"It made me a person
who could get a book out of the library."
They drove on, heading for the city limits at a few klicks over the
speed limit. Fast, lots of green lights.
"What did I just say?" Alan said.
"You said it was your first piece of ID," Mimi said. She was twitching
worriedly in the passenger seat. Alan realized that she was air-driving,
steering and braking an invisible set of controls as he veered around
the traffic. "You said it made you a person --"
"That's right," Alan said. "It did."
#
He never understood how he came to be enrolled in kindergarten. Even in
those late days, there were still any number of nearby farm folk whose
literacy was so fragile that they could be intimidated out of it by a
sheaf of school enrollment forms. Maybe that was it -- the five-year-old
Alan turning up at the school with his oddly accented English and his
Martian wardrobe of pieces rescued from roadside ditches and snitched
off of clotheslines, and who was going to send him home on the first day
of school? Surely the paperwork would get sorted out by the time the
first permission-slip field trip rolled around, or possibly by the time
vaccination forms were due. And then it just fell by the wayside.
Alan got the rest of his brothers enrolled, taking their forms home and
forging indecipherable scrawls that satisfied the office ladies.
Pages:
300
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