Enders In Exile

piece of
business but it needed doing. If that Ender Wiggin boy is available,
I've got a list of other people that need some good serious
destruction. What do you want, anyway?"
    "I don't want to go
into space. With Mother. But I'm still a minor. If you would sign as my
guardian, I could get emancipated and stay home. It's in the law."
    "As your guardian?"
    "Yes. To supervise me
and provide for me. I'd live here."
    "Get out."
    "What?"
    "Stand up and get out.
You think this is a hotel? Where exactly do you think you'd sleep? On
the floor, where I'd trip on you in the night and break my hip? There's
no room for you here. I should have known you'd be making demands. Out!"
    There was no room for
argument. In moments Alessandra found herself charging down the stairs,
furious and humiliated. This woman was even crazier than Mother.
    I have nowhere to go,
thought Alessandra. Surely the law doesn't allow my mother to
force
me to go into space, does it? I'm not a baby, I'm not a
child,
I'm fourteen, I can read and write and make rational choices.
    When the train got back
to Monopoli, Alessandra did not go directly home. She had to think up a
good lie about where she'd been, so she might as well come up with one
that covered a longer time. Maybe the Dispersal Project office was
still open.
    But it wasn't. She
couldn't even get a brochure. And what was the point? Anything
interesting would be on the net. She could have stayed after school and
found out all she wanted to know. Instead she went to visit her
grandmother.
    That's proving what
good decisions I make.
    Mother was sitting at
the table, a cup of chocolate in front of her. She looked up and
watched Alessandra shut the door and set down her book bag, but she
said nothing.
    "Mother, I'm sorry,
I—"
    "Before you lie," said
Mother softly, "the witch called me and screamed at me for sending you.
I hung up on her, which is what I usually end up doing, and then I
unplugged the phone from the wall."
    "I'm sorry," said
Alessandra.
    "You didn't think I had
a
reason
for keeping her out of your life?"
    For some reason, that
pulled the trigger on something inside Alessandra and instead of trying
to retreat, she erupted. "It doesn't matter whether you had a reason,"
she said. "You could have ten million reasons, but you didn't tell any
of them to me! You expected me to obey you blindly. But you don't obey
your
mother blindly."
    "
Your
mother isn't a monster," said Mother.
    "There are many kinds
of monsters," said Alessandra. "You're the kind that flits around like
a butterfly but never lands near me long enough to even know who I am."
    "Everything I do is for
you!"
    "Nothing is for me.
Everything is for the child you imagine you had, the one that doesn't
exist, the perfect, happy child that was bound to result from your
being the exact opposite of your mother in every way. Well, I'm not
that child. And in your mother's house, the electricity is on!"
    "Then go live there!"
    "She won't let me!"
    "You would hate it.
Never able to touch anything. Always having to do things
her
way."
    "Like going off on a
colony ship?"
    "I signed up for the
colony ship
for you.
"
    "Which is like buying
me a supersized bra. Why don't you look at who I am before you decide
what I need?"
    "I'll tell you what you
are. You're a girl who's too young and inexperienced to know what a
woman needs. I'm ten kilometers ahead of you on that road, I know
what's coming, I'm trying to get you what you'll need to make that road
easy and smooth, and you know what? In spite of you, I've done it.
You've fought me every step of the way, but I've done a great job with
you. You don't even
know
how good a job I've done
because you don't know what you could have been."
    "What could I have
been, Mother? You?"
    "You were never going
to be me," said Mother.
    "What are you saying?
That I would have been
her
?"
    "We'll never know what
you would have been, will we? Because you already are what I made you."
    "Wrong. I
look
like whatever I have to
look
like in order to
stay alive in your home. Down inside, what I really am is a complete
stranger to you. A stranger that you intend to drag off into space
without even asking me if I wanted to go. They used to have a word for
people you treated like that. They called them
slaves.
"
    Alessandra wanted more
than ever before in her life to run to her bedroom and slam the door.
But she didn't have a bedroom. She slept on the sofa in the same room
with the kitchen and the kitchen table.
    "I