Korê in New York

What happens when a kid refuses to leave the past behind? What happens when the past won't go away? Read on and don't worry about the emotional damage.

1. Five Years

   Dad watched over me in the laundry room Thursday night before I was scheduled to leave for the Caribbean and spend six days with the Sidlows and shadowy others. This was payback time for the subtle torture my family worked on Margolin Sidlow over Christmas vacation. I tried not to think about that.

   “Did you finally buy your bra-zeers?” Dad asked. He had no problem with a daughter who wore a bra. He’d had two wives and probably a few girlfriends who had. It was part of femaleness and Dad lived mainly around women when he was not working.

   “Yes, on Monday,” I replied.

   “Did you show them to RoAnn?”

   I had indeed. I’d done a whole bra modeling fashion show both with clothing and without. RoAnn told me the bras looked great and refunded me the cash I spent. I was glad for the lack of static. It was still too cold for bras in New York City in the winter though. I was not used to them and had gotten unused to them since my old ones wore out. Maybe my skin was too dry and sensitive. Maybe worry oozed out through my pores.

   “You need to know what you’re going to be seeing and where you’re going to be going tomorrow?” Dad began.

   “Why hadn’t he told me this sooner?” I wondered. I knew. He had been working and then Kyril ran away and then…. I was the then right now. I could live with that.

   “OK…It’s in the Turks and Caicos,” I had done my homework even when no one assigned any homework.

   “What’s it called?” Dad liked playing Twenty Questions.

   “Rialitee,” I said. “It’s a play on words.”

   “Who plays games like that?”

   “ECBAS is too dumb and so is Youth Voices. That leaves Star Corps.” Did I win the prize?

   “So far….but those were the easy questions?”

   “What kind of a place do you think Rialitee is?”

   “Not very real,” I laughed. “Actually, it probably resembles the pleasure palaces in Dix Hills and Espy, Pennsylvania.”

   Dad shook his head. “The shopping complexes are designed for short meetings and distribution of reasonably public information. They don’t ever have hotels attached to them.”

   I hadn’t thought of that. “Did you design any of them?” I asked.

   “I’m a civil engineer not and architect, but I have seen the plans and I did work on some of them. There no more secrets.”

   “Buushit. You’re full of secrets. Did you work on hotels like Rialitee in Saudi Arabia?” I asked.

   “Not Saudi Arabia, but yes, I’ve worked on resorts for Star Corps. They don’t tell me everything. I get to see the plans.”

   “Did you work on Rialitee?”

   “Yes, I designed the water system and did all the envrionmental impact work. Star Corps does not so much want to be green as just not make a big stink, but this is not helping you. You know what paid your Houghton tuition. That’s not important right now.

   “Kore you have to think of what might go on in a place like Rialitee. “

   “They have meetings and talk about buying stuff and  how dumb school is and how cool they all are.”

   “OK,  but think bigger picture. How do you think the top leadership of ECBAS feel right now?”

   “Rotten,” I replied.

   Dad blinked.

   “One in every three high schools and even more middle schools in New York City are going to be Full Academic in September,” I crowed.

   “You only have half the numbers game, Kore,” Dad shook his head. “Kore, what percentage of Math A/B students took the Math A Regents two weeks ago?”

   “Thirty eight percent here in New York City,” I replied.

   “And statewide?”

   “Thirty percent…”

   “What does that tell you?”

   “Seventy percent of the kids missed the test.”

   “And what if we take out the resistent or nearly resistent high schools which had a turn out of close to a hundred percent?”

   I swallowed. “Kore, only twenty percent of all high school students are academically engaged. Among middle schoolers the proportion is around twenty-five percent. That’s national. Most people your age are going to lose one to five years of their lives depending on when they return…if they return.”

   I said nothing.

   “Star Corps got a huge head start. They’ll have it for long enough to change the world. There’s going to be a generation of kids who grow up having to board in another city to go to an academic high school, though that probably won’t happen here in New York. There are kids who will sacrifice their social lives to take challenging courses.  School has become a battle….

   “And that is only for the kids on our side. What about the rest?”

   “They’re assholes!” I blurted out as images of college and high school kids armed with improvised weaponry and menacing RoAnn and me leaped through my mind, and then there were the assholes who threw excrement at hte Calliope. I had reason for calling ECBAS scum assholes.

   “Think past that. Dad coached me. Try to pretend you are one of them, a leader in a cushy office, not one of the rank and file kids. Now do you just want to tear down the world?”

   “No, I guess I’d fucking want to play God,” I swore because Dad doesn’t care if I curse.

   “OK, so how are you going to rebuild the world you are destroying?”

   “I have to make sure someone besides illegal aliens is around to do the work.” Dad blinked.

   “I’d take all the kids who are wannabees but that nobody wants, at least not the cool kids who led the rebellion, and put them to work selling stuff and keeping the Pleasure Palaces clean. I’d also let some of the kids who are kind of in the middle become doctors and lawyers and engineers. They can apprentice with older people and take remedial courses once they realize they are at the bottom.

   “And of course the Fast Crowd or my cousins or whatever they call themselves is going to run things. Grownups, some grownups will talk about emotional intelligence…”

   “It’s social intelligence,” Dad cut me off.

   “I don’t want the fucking Fast Crowd running things!” I cried out.

   “The Fast Crowd, as you call them,” Dad continued, “needs a place to practice. Also, I think those in charage of StarCorps want to see what happens to the middling and lesser orders of kid once the walls are down and the Fast Crowd is in charge. Only so many kids can have the good life without working. What about the rest of us?”

   I felt dizzy and sick. “You want me to find out about all this,” I asked Dad.

   “Yes, and tell me and possibly Dr. Angelus.”

   “And you don’t worry about my getting hurt?”

   “You can’t be hurt. You won’t be hurt.”

   “Not physically. They’d get in trouble for that!” I blurted out. I remembered all too well Kyril and his counselor. They wouldn’t dare touch a hair on my head. My psyche which was still fairly raw even after eight months away from Houghton was another story.

   “All right and it’s only six days. Yes, they can try and make you feel like shit. Remember Margolin when her plastic died.”

   “What if they steal my books?”

   “Get on the Blackberry to me and I’ll see you get them back. They are too smart to attempt theft, unless one of the kdis does it, but I don’t think they’re going to be that heavy handed. It’s a closed system, a resort. It has its own desalinization plant and it is about five miles to the real town should you attempt an escape.

   “There have been all sorts of psychological experiments in small closed spaces. This is probably what the Sidlows have in mind. Kore, you’re going to have to learn as much as you can and protect yourself as well as you can.”

   “Why are you letting me do this?” I asked. A normal parent would not let his kid near Rialitee. My Dad wasn’t normal. I wasn’t normal either when I really thought about it.

   “We need to  know as much about the social end of StarCorps and ECBAS as possible. Margolin did not get much because Young Achievers is public and reactive.”

   All right. I understood. Some places in the worlds fifteen year olds were soldiers carrying machine guns and raping and killing. I was just going to be a nearly fifteen year old spy and I would only be putting my precious mental health at risk. I could live with that. At least I thought I could live with that.

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