The Year of the Flood

Ren fell asleep and dreamed about Amanda, who walks through a field of dry grass covered with white bones. In the dream, vultures fly over Amanda’s head, but she smiles and waves at Ren.

When Ren woke up, she busied herself with painting her toenails, because “if someone wants to suck your toes, those toes should be worth sucking” (238). Afterward, she turned on the intercom camera and looked at the room she shared with another dancer, Starlite. It was comforting for Ren to see her furniture and clothes, and she couldn’t wait to return to her “normal life” (238). Then she went on the internet and checked her horoscope, hoping to read something encouraging, but instead she only got a prediction that “romance may take strange forms” (239) in her life soon.

When Ren resumed watching what was going on in the club through the intercom camera, she noticed that a new Painballer had entered the club. He looked even “more explosive” than the first three, so Mordis immediately tried to distract him by sending three backup dancers his way. Mordis yelled at them to “use [their] tits” (240) to block the new guy’s view in case he wasn’t on friendly terms with the other three Painballers. Mordis was happy with how he solved the problem: With the new BlyssPluss drug, the man would get multiple orgasms and pass out.

On April Fish day, everything was as usual, but Ren remembered how she and Bernice had always decorated a Fish Cake together. The thought made her want to cry. She felt guilty and ashamed of how she had treated Bernice.

The same day, when Amanda and Ren walked back to their apartment, they heard Lucerne and Zeb fighting and decided to wait until their brawl ended. But this time they were fighting louder than usual, and since Amanda was eavesdropping, they heard Lucerne accuse Zeb of having sex with Nuala. These words made Ren very upset; she knew what Bernice must have felt when Ren said the same thing about her father.

After a while, Zeb came out looking angry and sad. Lucerne, who usually cried after their fights, this time started packing a backpack. She told Ren to get ready because they were leaving and going back to the HelthWyzer Compound. Ren was shocked, but Lucerne said it’s what Ren had always wanted. No matter how much Ren pleaded with Lucerne to let Amanda come as well, she wouldn’t agree, saying that Amanda didn’t have an identity so she wouldn’t be allowed inside HelthWyzer. When the two girls said their goodbyes, Amanda gave Ren her purple cell phone so they could stay in touch.

Lucerne produced a plastic pack full of money from underneath the soil of a tomato plant she’d been growing. Ren assumed she’d stolen it while selling soap and vinegar at the Tree of Life. Then Lucerne took the scissors and cut off her long hair, leaving it in the middle of the dining room table.

They walked for many hours through various neighborhoods to get to the HelthWyzer Compound. Before they approached the building, Lucerne tore part of her dress and smeared dirt on her face. When the gateway guards asked for their identities, she said that someone had abducted them and stolen their documents. While they waited for Lucerne’s husband, Ren asked if they were really abducted. Lucerne responded that Ren didn’t remember it because she was just a child back then, and started crying.

Even though Ren used to wish to return to the HelthWyzer Compound and her father, now that she was back, she was unhappy. She didn’t enjoy the luxuries of this new life and missed Amanda. Her father, Frank, was not like Ren had imagined him; he was “shorter, greyer, balder, and more confused-looking than what [she] had had in mind” (249). He wasn’t overjoyed when he came to the gate to identify them, and when he saw Ren, “his face fell” (249). Ren assumed it was because she looked too much like one of the pleebrats, and he was afraid that she would steal something from him.

Lucerne took Ren to the HelthWyzer clinic to check her for lice and worm. During those appointments, Ren heard the story that her mother had been telling everyone. According to Lucerne, they were abducted by a cult and taken somewhere, but they never told her the location. The reason for this was that one of the male members of the cult had been obsessed with Lucerne and “wanted her for his personal slave” (250). To keep her from running away, he took her shoes away (Ren assumed she was talking about Zeb, although Lucerne said she didn’t know his name). This man held Ren as a hostage, too, and made her “service his every twisted whim” (250). When she finally had a chance to share her story with another cult member, “a sort of nun” (250) whom Ren assumed to be Toby, the nun gave Lucerne shoes and money to escape.

Lucerne and Ren also went to psychiatry sessions, and before each session, Lucerne threatened Ren that if she told the truth, they would raid the Edencliff Garden and might kill Amanda. So Ren didn’t say anything, and Lucerne tried very hard to portray her daughter as being traumatized so that no one would believe her in case she did tell the truth.

One day, when Lucerne wasn’t around, Ren called Amanda. She complained that she couldn’t run away because Lucerne kept her identity locked. Amanda asked if Ren could “trade with the guards” (252) so that they would let her escape, but Ren explained that it didn’t work like that at HelthWyzer. Amanda only managed to give Ren the last news about Burt before Lucerne came into the room and Ren had to hang up.

After some time Lucerne insisted that Ren started going to school, presumably so that she could “make a whole new life” (254) for herself. In truth, she didn’t want Ren, who judged her for her lies, around all the time. She bought Ren new clothes and started calling her Brenda, insisting it was her real name.

The school was called HelthWyzer High, and on the first day, the administration sent a student to be Ren’s guide. The girl’s name was Wakulla Price, and she and Ren got along very well. Although Lucerne’s story was supposed to be confidential, as Ren soon found out, everyone at school had already heard it. Ren realized that telling anyone that Lucerne had lied would endanger her fellow Gardeners. She remembered Adam One’s words that they are all “in one another’s hands” (256).

The school building and the buildings around it were new and clean and had the latest technology. The first morning at the school, Ren felt extremely out of place, “as if the classes were in a foreign language” (256). The classes were very different from what Ren was used to, but the hardest part was using computers and paper notebooks. She still worried that if she wrote anything down, her enemies would find it and use it against her.

During the lunch break, Ren couldn’t force herself to eat anything because all food had meat in it. Other students gathered around her and started asking her questions about her time in captivity. Ren didn’t give them any details and just said that she was in “a greenie cult” (257). During their questioning, Ren realized other students found her interesting because she had lived in the pleeblands, where none of them had ever been. Ren felt tempted to tell them some bizarre details about her life in the cult, and to pretend she thought these details were as crazy as the HelthWyzer children did. Although she knew this would make her popular, she imagined how disappointed Adam One and Toby would be if they had heard her say it.

Wakulla accompanied Ren on her walk home along with Jimmy, Wakulla’s lab partner. Jimmy was very silly and made others laugh, although Ren could tell that he was sad on the inside. During one of their phone calls, Amanda told Ren that she had been stealing things from the mall with Shackie; he stood guard while she shoplifted in exchange for sex. When Ren asked Amanda if she loved Shackie, Amanda replied that “love was useless” (260).

Ren and Jimmy became close friends and started spending a lot of time together. Often they did their homework at Jimmy’s house, where Ren met his mother and his pet rakunk—a splice of a skunk and a racoon—called Killer. Jimmy’s mother and Ren got along, although Ren was not used to someone smoking as much as his mother did, and it made her cough. Jimmy’s father was always away because he was a scientist who worked on a way “to transplant human stem cells and DNA into pigs, to grow new human pieces” (261). Jimmy had seen those pigs, called pigoons, or pig balloons, because they were huge.

When they finished their homework, Jimmy and Ren spent time at the mall drinking Happicappuchinos. At first Ren resisted the idea because “Happicuppa was the brew of evil” (262), but when she tried it, she was hooked because of how good it tasted. Jimmy told Ren about his unrequited love for Wakulla and how he still couldn’t get over her rejection.

By this time, Ren had a diary, which she kept inside a stuffed bear. She wrote down everything that happened to her. She made sure to hide it well from Lucerne, remembering the Gardeners belief that “reading someone else’s secret words does give you power over them” (263).

After some time, a new student came to HelthWyzer High; his name was Glenn, and Ren immediately recognized him as the same Glenn who came to see Pilar at the Tree of Life. He gave her a little nod as if recognizing her, but they didn’t talk. Glenn acted like he was indifferent to everyone, but eventually he and Jimmy started spending a lot of time together. When Ren asked what they did, Jimmy said they played video games, but Ren was convinced they were watching porn.

After a while, Jimmy’s mom escaped from the HelthWyzer Compound with a lot of crucial data, and CorpSeCorps searched Jimmy’s house for clues. Since they were such close friends, Lucerne warned Ren that they might come to search their home as well.

The next time Jimmy and Ren saw each other at Ren’s apartment, Jimmy was very depressed: Not only was his mother was gone, but his father was also taken away, to help CorpSeCorps with their inquiries. What most saddened Jimmy was that his mother took Killer with her, to let her loose in the wild; she’d left Jimmy a note about it.

Hearing this, Ren hugged him and started crying; the two of them began kissing and slid into the bed. Ren felt as if she was helping Jimmy, like they were having sex “in honour of something” (265).

Ren fell in love with Jimmy and wanted to call Amanda and tell her about it, but then she remembered Amanda’s words that “people telling you about their sex was as boring as people telling you about their dreams” (266). She decided to call anyway, but when she went into her closet to get the purple phone, it was missing. Her diary was where she’d left it, but the phone was nowhere to be found. Lucerne came into Ren’s room and told her that she had thrown away her phone for security reasons. She didn’t want CorpSeCorps to find Ren’s phone or locate the number she had been calling, so she had sent a text message to the number telling that person to throw away their phone as well. At first Ren thought that her mother had done this to save Amanda, and then she realized that Lucerne just wanted to save Zeb, and that “despite everything, she still loves him” (267).

Now that Ren was in love with Jimmy, she understood her mother’s actions more and could see “how you could do extreme things for the person you loved” (267). Nevertheless, Ren was upset to lose touch with Amanda.

Jimmy and Ren continued to do their homework and sleep together until Ren asked if he was still in love with Wakulla. He didn’t answer for a long time, then asked if it mattered. Ren pretended like it didn’t, but his answer hurt her. Shortly after, Wakulla moved to the West Coast, and Jimmy became sulky, which proved that he still wasn’t over her. He now spent more time with Glenn than with Ren, and it made her very upset.

One day at the mall, Ren accidentally saw Jimmy kissing another girl from school, so she broke up with him. Afterward, Ren was depressed and lonely; the only thing that helped her through this period was remembering the Gardeners’ words about always being grateful. Then Ren started to spend more time with Glenn. She initially did it out of spite, to make Jimmy mad, but later they became quite close. The two talked a lot about the Gardeners without anyone knowing, and it was like “being in a secret club” (270). Glenn asked Ren many questions about the Gardeners’ everyday life, making her repeat Adam One’s speeches and sing the hymns.

Both Jimmy and Glenn were older than Ren, and they graduated two years before she did. Glenn went to the Watson-Crick Institute, and Jimmy went to the Martha Graham Academy. When it was Ren’s turn to graduate, she didn’t think she would get into college because she had bad grades, but Lucerne used her connections to secure Ren a spot at the Martha Graham Academy. Before leaving for college, Ren shoved her diary into a garboil dumpster.