Zoe's Tale (Old Man's War, #4)(14)

What I do know that it means is that I belong to the Obin. Even at that moment in front of the grave, Hickory and Dickory were recording it into their consciousness machines, the machines my father made for them. They would be stored and sent to all the other Obin. Every other Obin would stand here with me, as I knelt at my grave and the grave of my parents, tracing their names and mine with my finger.

I belong. I belong to John and Jane; I belong to Hickory and Dickory and every Obin. And yet for all that, for all the connection I feel - for all the connection I have - there are times when I feel alone, and I have the sensation of drifting and not connecting at all. Maybe that's just what you do when you're this age; you have your stretches of alienation. Maybe to find yourself you've got to feel like you're unplugged. Maybe everyone goes through this.

What I knew, though, there at the grave, my grave, was that I was having one of those moments.

I had been here before, to this grave. First when my mother was buried, and then, a few years later, when Jane brought me here to say good-bye to both my mother and father. All the people who know me have gone away, I said to her. All of my people are gone. And then she came over to me and asked me to live with her and John, in a new place. Asked me to let her and John be my new people.

I touched the jade elephant at my neck and smiled, thinking of Jane.

Who am I? Who are my people? Who do I belong to? Questions with easy answers and no answers. I belong to my family and to the Obin and sometimes to no one at all. I am a daughter and goddess and girl who sometimes just doesn't know who she is or what she wants. My brain rattles around my head with this stuff and gives me a headache. I wish I were alone here. I'm glad John's with me. I want to see my new friend Gretchen and make sarcastic comments until we burst out laughing. I want to go to my stateroom on the Magellan, turn off the light, hug my dog, and cry. I want to leave this stupid cemetery. I don't ever want to leave it because I know I'm never coming back to it. This is my last time with my people, the ones who are already gone.

Sometimes I don't know if my life is complicated, or if it's that I just think too much about things.

I knelt at the grave, thought some more, and tried to find a way to say a last good-bye to my mother and father and to keep them with me, to stay and to go, to be the daughter and goddess and girl who doesn't know what she wants, all at once, and to belong to everyone and keep myself.

It took a while.
   


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"Oh, look," Gretchen said. "Teenage boys, about to do something stupid."

"Shut up," I said. "That couldn't possibly happen." But I looked anyway.

Sure enough, across the Magellan's common area, two clots of teenage males were staring each other down with that look of we're so gonna fight about something lame. They were all getting ready for a snarl, except for one of them, who gave every appearance of trying to talk some sense into one guy who looked particularly itchin' to fight.

"There's one who appears to have a brain," I said.

"One out of eight," Gretchen said. "Not a really excellent percentage. And if he really had a brain he'd probably be getting out of the way."

"This is true," I said. "Never send a teenage boy to do a teenage girl's job."

Gretchen grinned over to me. "We have that mind-meld thing going, don't we?"

"I think you know the answer to that," I said.

"You want to plan it out or just improvise?" Gretchen asked.

"By the time we plan it out, someone's going to be missing teeth," I said.

"Good point," Gretchen said, and then got up and started moving toward the boys.

Twenty seconds later the boys were startled to find Gretchen in the middle of them. "You're making me lose a bet," she said, to the one who looked the most aggressive.

The dude stared for a moment, trying to wrap whatever was passing for his brain around this sudden and unexpected appearance. "What?" he said.

"I said, you're making me lose a bet," Gretchen repeated, and then jerked a thumb over toward me. "I had a bet with Zoe here that no one would start a fight on the Magellan before we actually left dock, because no one would be stupid enough to do something that would get their entire family kicked off the ship."

"Kicked off the ship two hours before departure, even," I said.

"Right," Gretchen said. "Because what sort of moron would you have to be to do that?"

"A teenage boy moron," I suggested.

"Apparently," Gretchen said. "See - what's your name?"

"What?" the guy said again.

"Your name," Gretchen said. "What your mother and father will call you, angrily, once you've gotten them kicked off the ship."

The guy looked around at his friends. "Magdy," he said, and then opened his mouth as if to say something.

"Well, see, Magdy, I have faith in humanity, even the teenage male part of it," Gretchen said, plowing through whatever it was that our Magdy might have had to say. "I believed that not even teenage boys would be dumb enough to give Captain Zane an excuse to kick a bunch of them off the ship while he still could. Once we're under way, the worst he could do is put you in the brig. But right now he could have the crew drop you and your family at the loading bay. Then you could watch the rest of us wave good-bye. Surely, I said, no one could be that incredibly dense. But my friend Zoe disagreed. What did you say, Zoe?"