HELPER12, Jack Blaine [reading in the dark .TXT] 📗

not to buy a homosexual child.  She’s already had her fill of trouble from that sort.” He looks away.

Chapter Twelve

I rock Jobee softly in my arms.  Dinner had been so tense; I need the comfort more than Jobee does.

Thomas hadn’t said much more to me, after his comment about Ms. Sloane and how she would be careful what sort of baby she bought.  He’d stood without finishing his food, and after he asked—more like told—me to join him again the next night, he’d left.  I ate a little more and retreated to my room with Jobee.

I wonder what’s going on.

Is Thomas a homosexual?  It’s true that homosexuals—they’re called kinks in the complexes—get persecuted; so do pasties or twitchers.  People just tend to pick on what isn’t in the majority.  But I assumed things might be different in Society—I wonder if the inability to control your hands from trembling gets you in trouble here, too?  If wanting to touch someone the same sex as you will get you jeered at, or worse.  It’s all the way people are born, but it’s not the norm.  And the norm is what you want to be, in this world.  The norm, or rich, I always thought.  Until tonight.

The rich must not like anything out of the ordinary, either.  I wonder if Ms. Sloane bought Jobee to make up for Thomas, somehow.  If she thought she could get over the disappointment of having a kink son, by getting one who wasn’t.

I’ve never cared about those kinds of differences.  Kris, my only friend, is both a pasty and a twitcher; she was born with albino-white skin, and her hands twitch of their own accord, no matter how hard she tries to stop them.  It’s a legacy of faulty genetics that some babies have, from being born to Breeders who were inseminated with defective sperm.  The worst of the twitchers are tagged and cut in Pre Ward; they have to be because they can’t take care of themselves, or provide any service. But twitchers like Kris do fine—they get tracked and trained and get through okay, save for the jeers that get shouted, or the occasional beating they endure at the hands of some stupid street punks.  And white skin?  Well, that doesn’t affect your ability to work.

Kris never said anything to me about being a twitcher.  She did say something about being a pasty once.  It was right after we got back from the shops one night; we’d gone for skinner trims and some supplies.  On the way out of the station, some punks had surrounded us; they had shouted at her, jeering.  Pasty girl, pasty girl, they kept yelling.  We screamed back at them, told them to shut their mouths, and they ran away when they saw a police cruiser coming up the street.

“I thought that might get nasty,” she said, when we were safe inside her cube.

“Nah,” I answered.  “Just kids.  Stupid kids.”

“Hmmm.”  Kris looked down at her hands, watching them quiver.  She put one of them next to my hand.  It practically glowed in comparison to my own.  “Stupid kids,” she said, quietly, “just like the ones who killed that pasty last week in the Eastern Quad.”

I looked down at her hand.  Then I looked at her face.

“Kris, you know that I don’t care about that kind of thing, right?”

“You’re lucky,” she said.  “Steady and flush, that’s you Benna.  So you don’t have to care.”

“Don’t forget straight,” I said, grinning at her.

She laughed, like I’d hoped she would, and said something about how that was a good thing, since I was too ugly to touch anyway.

I don’t remember us talking about it again.  But I thought about it sometimes.  I thought about how Kris did have to care, and how that must be for her.  I’ve been afraid walking down the street in the complex plenty of times, but not because of the color of my skin, or the way my hands move, or who I want to touch.  In the complex, if I wanted to grab a touch I’d go find a likely boy—there are plenty who are willing.  I tried to imagine what it would be like if grabbing a touch—something I gave little to no thought to—was so dangerous it could cost me my life.

I wonder if that’s how it is for Thomas.  Even if he’s rich, he must still have problems because he’s a kink.  I wonder if that’s why he was expelled from his fancy school.

Jobee usually lets me sleep all the way through the night now.  But I wake on this night, out of a sound sleep.  I check on Jobee, but he’s sleeping happily, breath snuffling through his sweet little lips.  I wonder what woke me.

Then I hear it.

It’s coming from downstairs—I think it must be on the second floor.  The only person on that floor right now is Thomas.  His parents’ bedroom is there too, but they are still on their anniversary trip.  Helper and the Driver have bedrooms on the first floor, in the back.

I walk to the landing of the stairs, outside my bedroom door and lean over, a hand behind my ear.  I hear the noise again—it’s a low moan, so soft I wonder if I’m really hearing it.

I creep down the stairs, moving slowly and carefully, so I make as little noise as possible.  At the second floor landing, I can see the door to Thomas’s room is open just a crack, light from it streaking the dark hallway floor.  I tiptoe nearer, and the noise comes again—it’s the sound of someone weeping.  I go to the door and peek.

It’s Thomas, doubled over in a sort of grief that I’ve never seen in real life.  He’s covering his face with his hands, and his back is heaving up and down with each sob that wrenches its way free.  I can tell he’s struggling to be quiet, and that, for some reason, makes me feel almost worse than