The narrative switches to Ren. She recalls the night when the Waterless Flood began. That afternoon, as in the days that preceded, she was locked in the Sticky Zone, and her boss, Mordis, called her on the videophone to check on her. After a brief conversation with him, she watched the girl who was replacing her, Savona, dance on the trapeze.

Afterward, Ren turned off the video and called her friend Amanda; the two girls have been very close since childhood. Amanda was preparing a Bioart installation in the Wisconsin desert. When the state suffered from a devastating drought 10 years earlier, officials decided it would be cheaper to slaughter the remaining cattle than transport them elsewhere. This left the state covered with cow bones, and Amanda wanted to drag them into a pattern that could only be seen from the sky. Her plan was to spell out a word—kaputt—cover the cow bones in pancake syrup, wait until insects swarmed them, and then shoot a video of it from the air and present it in galleries.

Amanda enjoyed watching things “move and grow and then disappear” (68). She got money for her art projects from various sponsors; this time someone from the CorpSeCorps agreed to fly her on a helicopter so she could shoot the video.

This project was part of a series called “The Living World,” and she joked that the Gardeners had inspired her to do it since they didn’t allow the members to write anything down. Amanda told Ren that she was sending a message with her project to “Mr. Rich and Bigs” (68), and she was not afraid to get in trouble for it because she was sure they wouldn’t understand it.

After Amanda hung up the phone, Ren thought about how long they had known each other and realized that it had been over 15 years. They met when Amanda first joined the Gardeners; Ren wondered what her fellow Gardeners would think of her if they knew that she worked as a trapeze dancer. Ren’s sure that Amanda, the only one who knows, understands and doesn’t judge her, and if Toby found out, she would be mad at the strip club, not at Ren.

This chapter centers on Ren’s childhood with the Gardeners. Ren’s parents, Lucerne and Zeb, first took her there in Year Seven. Back then she didn’t like the group. Although they were friendly, they scared her with their talk about death being a natural process and about the human body becoming compost in the future. Ren was not the only child in the community, there were also Shackie and Croze—two brothers who used to tease her, and a girl called Bernice.

They all went to the Gardener school, which used to be a Wellness Clinic. Since paper was considered sinful because “it was made from the flesh of trees” (72), pupils wrote on slates, which were wiped off at the end of each day. The Gardeners didn’t want the children to leave “words lying around where [their] enemies might find them” (72).

During most of their time at school, the children memorized and chanted the Gardeners’ history or teachings. They also studied math and science, as well as memorized every saint’s day. Among their classes were Culinary Arts; Sewing; Mental Arithmetic; Bees and Mycology; Holistic Healing, which was taught by Toby; Meditation; Wild and Garden Botanicals; Predator-Prey Relationship; and Animal Camouflage. When children were 13, they also studied Emergency Medical and Human Reproductive System.

The Gardeners’ children had nicknames for all their teachers. They called Toby the Dry Witch; “witch” because she was always mixing some kind of potion, and “dry” because “she was so thin and hard” (74). Although Toby was strict with the children, they trusted her more than other teachers, because “you’d trust a rock more than a cake” (75).

Ren recalls how she lived with her mother and her mother’s boyfriend in a building near the Garden. Their space was one big room, separated by curtains made of plastic-bag strips and duct tape. Ren slept on a futon stuffed with hay and husks, and instead of a blanket she had a quilt sewed out of blue jeans and used bathmats. She bathed once a week because the Gardeners didn’t want to use a lot of water or soap. Her clothes were always damp because they didn’t allow dryers, so they had to dry in the sun.

Lucerne, Ren’s mother, liked to stay in bed as long as possible, although in their former home, at HelthWyzer, when they still lived with Ren’s father, Lucerne was rarely inside the house. Zeb ignored the Gardeners’ rule about taking only one shower a week and showered daily, although the shower itself was a garden hose with a rain barrel on top of it. While Zeb was in the shower, he liked to sing, “Nobody gives a hoot, / And that is why we’re down the chute” (77). He sang cheerfully, “in his big Russian-bear voice” (77).

Back then, Ren’s attitude toward Zeb was ambivalent. She was glad to have someone so respected in her family, but she was sometimes scared of him. Zeb was a tall man with massive, broad shoulders and long hair, and he looked “as if he’d break your neck if necessary, but not for fun” (78). Lucerne always told Ren to be nice to him because he was like her real father, but when Zeb was kind to Ren, Lucerne didn’t like it, so Ren was confused about how she should treat him.

While Zeb was in the shower, Ren tried to get something to eat, but there wasn’t much, so she hoped to eat at school. Ren then recalls their life at the HelthWyzer Compound, where they always had plenty of food. She felt a great yearning for her old life: She missed her father, her house, her room with “the bed with pink bed curtains and the closet full of different clothes in it” (78). Most of all, Ren wanted her mother to do the things she enjoyed doing in the past, like shopping and going to a spa.

Ren realizes that her mother had many reasons to leave her father, run away with Zeb, and join the Gardeners. Lucerne explained that she had done it for Ren’s sake, and to help keep the life on Earth from dying out completely.

On the days when Zeb wasn’t home, Lucerne grew worried and anxious, hardly paying attention to her daughter. Ren didn’t understand why she worshipped Zeb so much. The other thing about the Gardeners that Ren didn’t like was that they all had to wear plain dark clothes. She wanted to dress like the pleebrats—the street children—and wear bright, glittery dresses. The Gardeners’ children were forbidden to make friends with the pleebrats, but they stilled eavesdropped on their conversations and thus became more worldly.

This chapter describes the beginning of Ren’s friendship with Amanda. The two girls first met in Year Ten, when Ren was 10 years old. On that day the Gardeners’ children, who were also called Young Bioneers, were sent to scavenge for soap ends near the nice hotels that threw away a lot of good soap. The Gardeners took the leftovers, simmered them into jelly, cooled it, and cut it into pieces. This soap was usually for the Gardeners’ use, since they were terrified of germs and washed hands at least seven times a day, but they also took some pieces, wrapped them in leaves, tied them with strands of twisted grass, and later sold them to tourists and at the Gardeners’ Tree of Life Natural Materials Exchange.

The day when Ren met Amanda wasn’t a soap day but a vinegar day—a day when the Gardener children searched bar and nightclub entrances for any leftover wine, which they later poured into their Young Bioneer enamel buckets. The Gardeners then fermented the wine until they had vinegar, which they used for household cleaning. Sometimes they sold some of the vinegar along with their handmade soap.

The Young Bioneer work was supposed to teach the Gardener children that there was “no such thing as garbage, trash, or dirt, only matter that hadn’t been put to a proper use” (83). The Gardeners wanted everyone, not just the adults, to work for the sake of the community.

Sometimes older boys, including Shackie and Croze, drank the wine instead of pouring it into the bucket and then got into fights with the pleebrats. They wanted to be a street gang, so as soon as they were out of sight of the Garden, they behaved like one.

The Young Bioneers were supposed to work in groups, but one day, when Ren was scavenging with Bernice, the two girls had a fight over who should take a beaded purse they found, and they went in different directions. Ren wandered by herself to the mallway located in their pleeb called the Sinkhole, “because people vanished into it without a trace” (85). At the mall, Ren spotted Amanda in a group of girls and immediately envied the way they looked, “as if they already owned everything from every single store and were bored with it” (87). Making sure that no one was watching, Ren approached Amanda.

Amanda recognized Ren as one of the Gardeners, but Ren assured her that she was “more or less visiting them” and “nothing like them at all” (88). Ren was fascinated by Amanda’s jellyfish bracelet; it has an aerator, and the jellyfish had to be fed twice a week, otherwise they ate each other. Amanda offered the bracelet to Ren, but the girl refused, realizing she wouldn’t be able to buy food for the jellyfish once back in the Garden.

Afterward, Amanda took Ren to the alleyway in the back of Scales and Tails—a notorious strip club with pictures of girls completely covered with green scales on either side of the entrance. When Ren first saw the pictures, she wondered if the scales were pasted, but Bernice assured her that the Scales girls had to undergo a special surgery. Once, when Ren went with other kids on their Outdoor Classroom day, they found a dead girl with a few green scales left on her body, which confirmed Ren’s theory that the scales were pasted.

When Ren and Amanda came to the same spot behind the Scales and Tails, Amanda wrote her name in syrup and let a stream of ants crawl all over the letters; that’s how Ren learned Amanda’s name. Amanda explained that she liked to do such things because when ants eat what you’ve written, “you appear, then you disappear” (92). She said that she was from Texas, so Ren assumed that she must be an illegal refugee, who fled the state after the hurricanes and droughts, which was why she was “so interested in disappearing” (92). So Ren invited Amanda to come live with her, surprising even herself with her words. Bernice appeared, demanding that Ren come back with her to the Garden, but Ren announced that Amanda was coming with them.

Ren realized she couldn’t bring Amanda home because Lucerne considered children like her ruined. She planned to ask Adam One permission first, and if he agreed that Amanda could stay, then Lucerne wouldn’t be able to object.

Ren, Lucerne, and Amanda found Adam One at the Wellness Clinic, where he was helping bottle the vinegar. Ren told him that Amanda wanted to join the Gardeners because she had “seen the Light” (94). Although Amanda looked like a street child—she was wearing a miniskirt and silver gloves—she behaved very obediently and answered politely.

Adam One decided that Amanda should choose herself where she wanted to live—with Ren or with Bernice—and so she first went to Bernice’s house. When they entered Bernice’s apartment, they noticed a combination of very unpleasant smells. Some of them came from Bernice’s mother, Veena, who was sitting on the couch, oblivious to their presence. She neither cooked nor spoke, and the Gardeners considered her to be in a Fallow state; they thought she had retreated into herself “to gain Spiritual insight” (96). Lucerne thought she was simply depressed, but it was a word never used by the Gardeners.

While the four of them were still in the apartment, Burt the Knob, Bernice’s father, came home and scooped his daughter up, calling her “my little girl” (96). Burt was notorious for groping girls and holding them under the armpits. Bernice shouted and wiggled out of his embrace, but Ren and Lucerne left with Amanda to show her their home.

Lucerne told Ren she would have to share her room with Amanda and that they would have to sell Amanda’s inappropriate clothes. When Zeb came home in the evening, he initially didn’t say anything about Amanda’s presence, but later accused her of being “a sly little operator” (98).

Shortly after Amanda’s arrival, she became everyone’s favorite. When the Gardeners showed her how they performed their duties, she asked them “the right way to do things” (99) and thus won their affection. Although Amanda only pretended to be interested in the Gardeners’ activities, everyone around her, even Toby, who was “the hardest nut to crack” (99), believed she took a keen interest in their community and their work. Amanda confided to Toby that being nice to everyone was how she planned to “find stuff out” (99).

During their late-night conversations, Ren told Amanda about her former life in the HelthWyzer Compound, and Amanda described her escape from Texas. As a result of the droughts, her parents lost their Happicuppa coffee franchise, and since no one wanted to buy their house, they had to go to a refugee camp. While they were there, a hurricane hit, killing her father and destroying their temporary shelter. Amanda and her mother escaped death by holding on to a tree, and some men in a rowboat took them to the shelter in a football stadium. So afterward, her mother got sick from the drinking water and died because there was no medicine.

To get basic amenities, people in the shelter had to trade, agreeing to anything for food and water. The refugees were supposed to accept any job they were offered, even if it violated their basic rights. Amanda didn’t want to do this, so she changed her name from Barb Jones to Amanda, hoping that without an identity, she would be invisible. When Amanda hitch-hiked to get away from the shelter, a driver who stopped to pick her up tried to sexually abuse her, so she “stuck [her] thumbs in his eyes and got out of there fast” (101). Then she had to get on the side of the Wall, an obstacle built by the CorpSeCorps to keep the Tex-Mex refugees away. Afterward, she arrived in the neighborhood where she met Ren, and then decided to take advantage of living with the Gardeners.