Lies

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    Mr. Temple, can you explain the graves in the plaza?
    Sam clenched his fists and steadied his breathing.
    “What Francis did was commit suicide,” Dekka said.
    “I think that’s a little harsh,” Howard said. He leaned back in his chair, put his feet on the table, and interlaced his fingers over his skinny belly. He knew this would irritate Astrid. In fact, Sam guessed, he did it for just that reason. “He wanted to go running home to Mommy, what can I say? Of course, it’s hard for me to believe that anyone would choose to step out of the FAYZ. I mean, where else do you get to eat rats, use your backyard for a toilet, and live in fear of nineteen different kinds of scary?”
    No one laughed.
    “We can’t let kids do this,” Astrid said. She sounded quite sure.
    “How do we stop them?” Edilio asked. He raised his head, and Sam saw the distress on his face. “How do you think westop them? When your fifteenth birthday rolls around, the easy thing is to take the poof. You gotta fight to resist it. We know that. So how are we going to tell kids this isn’t real, this Orsay thing?”
    “We just tell them,” Astrid said.
    “But we don’t know if it’s real or not,” Edilio argued.
    Astrid shrugged. She stared at nothing and kept her features very still. “We tell them it’s all fake. Kids hate this place, but they don’t want to die.”
    “How do we tell them if we don’t know?” Edilio seemed genuinely puzzled.
    Howard laughed. “Deely-O, Deely-O, you are such a doof sometimes.” He put his feet down and leaned toward Edilio as if sharing a secret with him. “She means: We lie . Astrid means that we lie to everyone and tell them we do know for sure.”
    Edilio stared at Astrid like he was expecting her to deny it.
    “It’s for people’s own good,” Astrid said in a low voice, still looking at nothing.
    “You know what’s funny?” Howard said, grinning. “I was pretty sure we were coming to this meeting so Astrid could rank on Sam for not telling us the whole truth. And now, it turns out we’re really here so Astrid can talk us all into becoming liars.”
    “Becoming?” Dekka snarked with a cynical look at Howard. “Wouldn’t exactly be a transformation for you, Howard.”
    Astrid said, “Look, if we let Orsay go on with this craziness, we could not only have kids stepping out on their fifteenth.We could have kids not wanting to wait that long. Kids deciding to end it right away and thinking they’d wake up on the other side with their parents.”
    Everyone at the table leaned back at once, taking that in.
    “I can’t lie,” John said simply. He shook his head, and his red curls shook, too.
    “You’re a member of the council,” Astrid snapped. “You have to abide by our decisions. That’s the deal. That’s the only way it works.” Then, in a calmer voice, she said, “John, isn’t Mary coming up on her fifteenth before long?”
    Sam saw the jab hit home. Mary was perhaps the single most necessary person in Perdido Beach. From the start she had stepped up and run the day care. She’d become a mother to the littles.
    But Mary had her own problems. She was anorexic and bulimic. She ate antidepressants by the handful, but the supply was rapidly running out.
    Dahra Baidoo, who controlled the medicines in Perdido Beach, came to Sam secretly and told him that Mary was in every couple of days, asking for whatever Dahra might have. “She’s taking Prozac and Zoloft and Lexapro, and these aren’t just nothing little meds, Sam. People have to go on and off these things carefully, according to the book. You don’t just grab whatever and mix them all up.”
    Sam hadn’t told anyone but Astrid about it. And he’d warned Dahra to keep it to herself. Then he’d made a mental note to talk to Mary, and had forgotten to ever follow up.
    Now, from John’s stricken expression, Sam could guessthat he was far from certain that Mary wouldn’t give in to the poof and step out.
    They took a vote. Astrid, Alberto, and Howard shot their hands up immediately.
    “No, man,” Edilio said, shaking his head. “I’d have to lie to my own people, my soldiers. Kids who trust me.”
    “No,” John voted. “I…I’m just a kid and all, but I would have to lie to Mary.”
    Dekka looked at Sam. “What do you say, Sam?”
    Astrid interrupted. “Look, we could do this temporarily. Just until we find out if Orsay is making this all up. If she came out later and admitted it was all