The Other Side of the Island Read Online Free PDF Page A

looked. She saw that she and her father had both guessed wrong. The spider wasn’t dead, and he had not escaped either. He was still struggling against the glass.
     
    All day Honor sat at her desk and wished she were home. Not home in the hot town house, home in the North, in the strange wild places. Home where her parents paddled boats through marshy fields and the ruins of old buildings. Home where ducks nested in drowned fairgrounds. In her homesickness a memory returned to her. She was sitting in a boat and trailing her hand in the water. Beneath the surface she saw something glint and shine. She saw the head of a horse adorned with gold and jewels.
    “This was called a carousel,” Will told Honor.
    “Look at the mirrors,” said Pamela, pointing at the spotted silver gleaming underwater.
    “Children rode on these painted animals. See the lion? And the white swan? I’m not sure what this one is called. What’s this orange one?” Will asked Pamela.
    Honor reached through the water to caress the mysterious painted creature with black and orange stripes. Water rippled over his long, sinewy body. She tried to touch his sparkling eye.
    Honor rarely dreamed now of the cool mornings in the North and scarlet trees. She could no longer picture the wild sky with its Unpredictable colors, changeable and always new. The sky she saw now was only one color at a time, and those colors changed each hour, according to the clock. In the City, a golden yellow sky was pure yellow without any other hue mixed in. When the sky was blue, it was Sky Blue, exactly like the crayon in the box.
    As the clock on the wall ticked away, Honor sensed her classmates waiting too. They loved to hear Honor lose her place in recitations. The other girls lived on high ground in the City, in tall apartment buildings waves could never touch. They lived in villas in the mountains with flowering gardens and turquoise sprinkler pools. Honor saw these places as she rode the bus. The other girls visited each other after school, but they would never visit her. “Did you know?” they whispered to one another. “She lives by the shore.” The girls were always polite to her in class when Mrs. Whyte was looking, because politeness was the rule, but they taunted Honor the minute the teacher’s back was turned.
    “Shorebird, shorebird,” they chanted softly.
    The moment came. The whole class waited as Honor stood trembling by the board.
    “Take your time,” said Mrs. Whyte.
    “After the Flood, disease, warfare, and famine . . .”
    “Use your whole voice,” said Mrs. Whyte.
    “. . . decimated the human population. Then Earth Mother, the Provider, rose up. She was a simple schoolteacher, a cookie baker. She loved flowers and children and sunshine and song. She believed in . . .”
    Honor looked out at her classmates in their identical school uniforms. Everyone sat perfectly, heads up, backs straight. Everyone held still, except that in the second row, Hester was slowly, slowly crossing her eyes. Honor looked away quickly, but she’d lost her place. “She believed in . . .” All she could think was that Hester’s dark eyes were drawing closer and closer together.
    “Believed in what?” Mrs. Whyte asked.
    Honor had no idea.
    “Search your memory,” said Mrs. Whyte.
    Honor hung her head. When she looked up, Hester was smiling at her again. Her eyes were in the right places.
    “Honor,” said Mrs. Whyte. “Once again, you are unprepared.”
    “But I—”
    “Are you contradicting me?” asked Mrs. Whyte.
    “No,” said Honor.
    “You need a simpler text,” said Mrs. Whyte. “Can you read this?” She handed Honor a card with just a few lines printed on it. “Can you remember this?”
    Honor nodded.
    “Recite it with your whole voice.”
    No, Honor thought when she saw the nursery rhyme. Please don’t make me.
    “Let’s hear it,” snapped Mrs. Whyte.
    “Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home,” Honor recited. “The earth is on fire. Your