Arcadia Read Online Free Page B

Caravaners, who worked alone for the first two years to reinforce the secret tunnel between the Octagonal Barn and Arcadia House with sheets of metal, stocking it with barrels of water, canned goods, matches, tarps, iodine salt. Ollie has the pale softness of a salamander down by the stream; sometimes, he jerks and blinks and goes silent in the middle of a sentence.
    The badness even spreads, at times, to the kidlets. Bit won’t go into the fruit room in the Free Store, despite all those delicious wrinkling apples in their barrels. Someone put up an enormous black-and-white poster with a glowering man in moustachios. There are words Bit is far too frightened to piece out beyond Big Brother; and even when adults go in, they look at the poster and come out fast.
    Hannah and Abe share the same nightmare from their childhood: a dim room with a fat woman who stands before them, a siren overhead, a scramble under the desks, a white flash. These dreams have been catching at Hannah often recently, spiderwebs tightening the more she tries to escape. Most days, when the first sun melts itself across the Bread Truck linoleum, the panic from the dream slowly vanishes, leaving an oily taste behind to taint the air.
    But this morning, Bit wakes alone, heart racing. The icicles in the window are shot with such red light of dawn that Bit goes barefoot over the snow to pull one with his hand. Inside again, he licks it down to nothing, eating winter itself, the captured woodsmoke and sleepy hush and aching cleanness of ice. His parents sleep on. All day, the secret icicle sits inside him, his own thing, a blade of cold, and it makes Bit feel brave to think of it.
    He watches his parents kiss goodbye. Their lips slide from each other’s cheeks, and as they turn, Abe pats the level on his belt with a hand and Hannah frowns at something Astrid calls out, waiting on the other side of the Quad with heaps of laundry in her hands. A shock; Bit hasn’t understood until now; his parents are vastly different from one another. There is only one Abe, beamy and talky and gathering his energy from things, Arcadia House made solid; but there two Hannahs. Summer Hannah is going away, the one who loved people, who gathered the children’s boots while they slept to paint the snouts of animals upon them, pigs and horses and birds and frogs, according to their wearers. His laughing mother, the loud one: in a place where all bodily functions are matter-of-fact, where even in solemn moments there are whole brass sections of flatulence, her gas is legendary for its thunder. La Pétomane, she nicknamed herself, with a flushed half-pride. That Hannah is as strong as the men. When someone yells “Monkeypower!” to get help with a mud-stuck truck or with digging sand from the creek for the Showerhouse concrete, she shows up first, works the longest, her back under the sleeveless shirt as taut and muscled as any of the men’s. That is the Hannah who cracks jokes under her breath until the ladies around her snortle; the one who shuts the curtains on the Bread Truck some days and opens her small, secret trunk that she isn’t supposed to keep, all possessions in Arcadia held in common. Then she pulls a delicate tablecloth out, her great-grandmother’s Belgian lace. She pulls teacups out, porcelain tender as skin, ten oil miniatures and a mahogany case of silver with five different kinds of forks, all vined with tiny lilies. She sets it up and makes a mint tea and orange-peel cookies with smuggled white sugar, and Bit and she have a tea party together all afternoon long.
    Ridley Sorrel Stone, one chews with one’s mouth closed! Summer Hannah says in the acid voice of her childhood deportment teacher. One puts one’s napkin on one’s lap! She and Bit clink teacups solemnly, accomplices.
    But this Hannah is burrowing inside a new one who has let the winter in. She has begun to stare at the walls and allows her braids to unravel. She forgets to start supper. Her