“That makes two of us,” I said. “I can hardly wait to get out of here.”

“Three,” said Amanda. “There’s two of them – the Tex-Mexicans. Plus you. Three.”

“Oh. Right. You’re looking great – that khaki outfit suits you.” She was tall, she had that rangy girl-explorer look. A pith-helmet look.

“You’re not bad yourself,” said Amanda. “Ren, you take care.”

“You take care too. Don’t let the Tex-Mex guys jump you.”

“They won’t. They think I’m crazy. Crazy women cut your dong off.”

“I didn’t know that!” I was laughing. Amanda liked to make me laugh.

“Why would you?” said Amanda. “You’re not crazy, you’ve never seen one of those things wriggling on the floor. Sweet dreams.”

“Sweet dreams too,” I said. But she’d clicked off.

I’ve lost track of the Saints’ Days – I can’t remember which one it is today – but I can count the years. I’ve used my eyebrow pencil on the wall to add up how long I’ve known Amanda. I’ve done it like those old cartoons of prisoners – four strokes and then one through them to make five.

It’s been a long time – over fifteen years, ever since she came into the Gardeners. So many people from my earlier life were from there – Amanda, and Bernice, and Zeb; and Adam One, and Shackie, and Croze; and old Pilar; and Toby, of course. I wonder what they’d think of me – of what I ended up doing for a living. Some of them would be disappointed, like Adam One. Bernice would say I was backslidden and it served me right. Lucerne would say I’m a slut, and I’d say takes one to know one. Pilar would look at me wisely. Shackie and Croze would laugh. Toby would be mad at Scales. What about Zeb? I think he’d try to rescue me because it would be a challenge.

Amanda knows already. She doesn’t judge. She says you trade what you have to. You don’t always have choices.

When Lucerne and Zeb first took me away from the Exfernal World to live among the Gardeners, I didn’t like it at all. They smiled a lot, but they scared me: they were so interested in doom, and enemies, and God. And they talked so much about Death. The Gardeners were strict about not killing Life, but on the other hand they said Death was a natural process, which was sort of a contradiction, now that I think about it. They had the idea that turning into compost would be just fine. Not everyone might think that having your body become part of a vulture was a terrific future to look forward to, but the Gardeners did. And when they’d start talking about the Waterless Flood that was going to kill everybody on Earth, except maybe them – that gave me nightmares.

None of it scared the real Gardener kids. They were used to it. They’d even make fun of it, or the older boys would – Shackie and Croze and their pals. “We’re all gonna diiiiie,” they’d say, making dead-person faces. “Hey, Ren. Want to do your bit for the Cycle of Life? Lie down in that dumpster, you can be the compost.” “Hey, Ren. Want to be a maggot? Lick my cut!”

“Shut up,” Bernice would say. “Or you’re going into that dumpster yourself because I’m shoving you in!” Bernice was mean, and she stood her ground, and most kids would back off. Even the boys would. But then I’d owe Bernice, and I’d have to do what she said.

Shackie and Croze would tease me, though, when Bernice wasn’t around to push back at them. They were slug-squeezers, they were beetle-eaters. They tried to gross you out. They were trouble – that’s what Toby called them. I’d hear her saying to Rebecca, “Here comes trouble.”

Shackie was the oldest; he was tall and skinny, and he had a spider tattoo on the inside of his arm that he’d punched in himself with a needle and some candle soot. Croze was a stumpier shape, with a round head and a missing side tooth, which he claimed had been knocked out in a street battle. They had a little brother whose name was Oates. They didn’t have any parents; they’d had some once, but their father had gone off with Zeb on some special Adam trip and had never come back, and then their mother had left, telling Adam One she’d send for them when she’d got herself established. But she never had.

The Gardener school was in a different building from the Rooftop. It was called the Wellness Clinic because that’s what used to be in there. It still had some leftover boxes full of gauze bandages, which the Gardeners were gleaning for crafts projects. It smelled of vinegar: across the hallway from the schoolrooms was the room the Gardeners used for their vinegar making.

The benches at the Wellness Clinic were hard; we sat in rows. We wrote on slates, and they had to be wiped off at the end of each day because the Gardeners said you couldn’t leave words lying around where our enemies might find them. Anyway, paper was sinful because it was made from the flesh of trees.

We spent a lot of time memorizing things and chanting them out loud. The Gardener history, for instance – it went like this:

Year One, Garden just begun; Year Two, still new; Year Three, Pilar started bees; Year Four, Burt came in the door; Year Five, Toby snatched alive; Year Six, Katuro in the mix; Year Seven, Zeb came to our heaven.

Year Seven should have said that I came too, and my mother, Lucerne, and anyway it wasn’t heaven, but the Gardeners liked their chants to rhyme.

Year Eight, Nuala found her fate; Year Nine, Philo began to shine.

I wanted Year Ten to have Ren in it, but I didn’t think it would.

The other things we had to memorize were harder. Mathematical and science things were the worst. We also had to memorize every saint’s day, and every single day had at least one saint and sometimes more, or maybe a feast, which meant over four hundred of those. Plus what the saints had done to get to be saints. Some of them were easy. Saint Yossi Leshem of Barn Owls – well, it was obvious what the answer was. And Saint Dian Fossey, because the story was so sad, and Saint Shackleton, because it was heroic. But some of them were really hard. Who could remember Saint Bashir Alouse, or Saint Crick, or Podocarp Day? I always got Podocarp Day wrong because what was a Podocarp? It was an ancient kind of tree, but it sounded like a fish.

Our teachers were Nuala for the little kids and the Buds and Blooms Choir and Fabric Recycling, and Rebecca for Culinary Arts, which meant cooking, and Surya for Sewing, and Mugi for Mental Arithmetic, and Pilar for Bees and Mycology, and Toby for Holistic Healing with Plant Remedies, and Burt for Wild and Garden Botanicals, and Philo for Meditation, and Zeb for Predator-Prey Relationships and Animal Camouflage. There were some other teachers – when we were thirteen, we’d get Katuro for Emergency Medical and Marushka Midwife for the Human Reproductive System, whereas all we’d had so far was Frog Ovaries – but those were the main ones.

The Gardener kids had nicknames for all of the teachers. Pilar was the Fungus, Zeb was the Mad Adam, Stuart was the Screw because he built the furniture. Mugi was the Muscle, Marushka was the Mucous, Rebecca was the Salt and Peppler, Burt was the Knob because he was bald. Toby was the Dry Witch. Witch because she was always mixing things up and pouring them into bottles and Dry because she was so thin and hard, and to tell her apart from Nuala, who was the Wet Witch because of her damp mouth and her wobbly bum, and because you could make her cry so easily.

In addition to the learning chants, the Gardener kids had rude ones they made up themselves. They’d chant softly – Shackleton and Crozier and the older boys would start, but then we’d all join in:

Wet Witch, Wet Witch,

Big fat slobbery bitch,

Sell her to the butcher, make yourself rich,

Eat her in a sausage, Wet Wet Witch!

It was especially bad about the butcher and the sausage, because meat of any kind was obscene as far as the Gardeners were concerned. “Stop that,” Nuala would say, but then she’d sniffle, and the older boys would give each other a thumbs-up.