Franklin Goes to School

The Pineapple Ranch

The thing about the Pineapple Ranch, Franklin had decided, was that it did not look like a place where anything hard had ever happened, and that was the entire point, and it had taken him a while to understand that the not-looking was on purpose.

It looked like a ranch. It was a ranch. There were cabins that had been carried across three hundred and forty-one years and a whole dimension so that the people who lived in them would not have to be homesick, and there was a plaza, and there was a Vulcan named Sinclair at a reception desk who had never once in Franklin's experience raised his voice, and there was, because it was Marky's, a smell of pizza that started around ten in the morning and did not stop. Kids came here when they were found. That was the whole function of the place. Somebody somewhere had something terrible happen to them, and the Clan went and got them, and then they came here, to the ranch that smelled like pizza, and somebody was awake at four in the morning, and nobody asked them to be all right by a particular Tuesday.

Franklin came out on the shuttle most weeks. He told everyone it was because he was medical crew and could help, which was true. The other reason, the one he did not say, was that he was fourteen and blue-haired and a warlock and an empath from a plane that no longer existed, and there was something about a room full of kids who had also lost a whole world that made his own chest quieter. He did not have a word for it. Zackary said the word was "family" and Franklin said the word was "statistically convenient" and Zackary threw a pillow at him.

Today there were nine new ones.

They had come in over the last few days, the way they always came in, "as they are found," which was a phrase Marky used that Franklin had learned not to think about too hard. Nine kids, ages all over the place, from three different rescues, sitting in the big room that had been a bunk house on a dead world, and every one of them had the look. Franklin knew the look. He had worn it. It was the look of a person waiting to find out what the catch was.

"Okay," said Marky, and clapped his small precise hands together, and eleven years old and a doctor for nineteen years before that, he stood up in front of nine frightened kids in a ceremonial white coat with cookies in the pockets. "So. Nobody's in trouble. I say that first because half of you did the math on the way in and decided a grown-up standing at the front of a room means somebody's in trouble, and I want that math cancelled. Nobody's in trouble. You're here because we need to talk about school."

Nine kids went, as one, very still.

The Four Doors

"See, that," said Marky, pointing at the stillness, entirely unbothered, "is exactly what I thought would happen, so let me get ahead of it. School, for a lot of you, was not a good place. School was where somebody found you, or school was the thing you got pulled out of, or school was a building where the people who were supposed to keep you safe filled out a form and did nothing. I know. I've read your files, the parts you let us have. So when I say school, I need you to hear a different word, and I don't have the different word yet, so we're going to build it together this morning."

He held up one finger.

"Here's the part nobody ever tells you. You get to pick."

A boy near the back, maybe twelve, said, "Pick what," in the flat voice of someone who has learned that questions are dangerous.

"Where you go. What kind. All of it." Marky started walking, slow, the way he did when he wanted the room to follow his hands instead of his face. "There are four ways to do this, and they are all real, and I mean all four are actually paid for and actually staffed and actually waiting for you, this is not a menu where three of the things are out. Door one. There's a school on the ground here, close, called Mountain Oaks. You go in person. You ride a bus, you sit in a room, you eat lunch that a woman named Beverly makes and pretends is nothing special even though she has a four-year degree and could be running the place. Franklin goes there. So does his brother. It's loud and it's normal and there are other kids and some of them are also from ended worlds, so you would not be the strange one. You would just be new."

He held up a second finger.

"Door two. Federation School, over subspace. You don't leave the ranch. A screen lights up and you're in a classroom that's really out there among the stars, with kids on ships and colonies and stations, learning the things you'd learn if you were going to crew a starship one day, which some of you might, I'm not going to tell you you won't. You can do it from a cabin here with the door shut and your own blanket, and nobody can see you if you don't want to be seen. Some of you are going to want that. The not-being-seen. That's allowed. That's a whole door."

Third finger.

"Door three. The Vulcan Academy, also over subspace. Now." Marky stopped walking and looked at them seriously. "I'm going to be honest about this one because Vulcans would want me to be. It's hard. It's the hardest of the four and they will not make it easier because they think making it easier is an insult, which, fair. But here is the thing about Vulcans that I have learned and that some of you are going to hear and go very quiet at, so listen. Vulcans do not pry. They will teach you geometry and they will teach you the history of a hundred worlds and they will never, not once, ask you how you're feeling or why you flinched or what happened before you came here. They think your insides are your own business. For some of you that is going to sound like the safest thing anyone has ever offered you, and you're right, it is, and it's door three."

A small girl in the second row had gone very still at that. Franklin noticed. Franklin noticed everything; it was the worst and best thing about him.

"And door four," said Marky, and spread both hands. "Any school. Anywhere on Earth. Any ordinary school in any ordinary town, and we make the paperwork say you've always been there, and you go and you are just a kid at a school and nobody knows a single thing about you, and you find out what it's like to have the biggest problem in your day be a spelling test. Some of you have never once been bored. Door four is where you go to find out what bored feels like. I'm told it's wonderful. I wouldn't know. I've been a doctor since before the crossing and boredom and I have never been introduced."

He put his hands back in his pockets, and came out with cookies, and did not offer them yet, just held them, so the room would know they were there.

"Four doors," Marky said. "You pick. Not me, not Bradley, not the Federation, not your file. You. And if you pick one and it's wrong, you pick again, because the doors don't lock behind you, that's the whole point, you are allowed to be wrong about what you want and change your mind and it costs you nothing, which I realize is going to sound made up to about half of you. It's not made up. Franklin, tell them it's not made up."

"It's not made up," said Franklin. "I picked Mountain Oaks and on the third day I hated it and I said so and nobody made me stay in the class I hated. They just moved me. I want to be clear that I complained a great deal and the total consequence to me was that a problem got solved. I found it deeply suspicious for about two weeks."

A couple of the kids almost smiled.

"Also," Franklin added, because he could not help himself, "if any of you want, I can teach you to defend yourself. Hand to hand, bladed, energy weapons at the higher tiers. It's very - "

"Franklin," said Marky.

"- it's a useful skill and it says welcome where I'm from - "

"Franklin, we've talked about this."

"I'm putting it on the table as a fifth door and I'm being told to take it off the table," Franklin said, with dignity, and sat back down, and the flat-voiced boy at the back was now openly grinning, which Franklin counted as a win worth the loss of the fifth door.

The One Who Did the Arithmetic

The small girl in the second row was named Sella, and Franklin had met her before, sort of.

He had not been on the ship the night the Saratoga pulled fifty-three people out of a dying ship inside the Neutral Zone, but everyone had heard about it, and everyone had heard about the little one at the end, the eight-year-old who had gone quiet in the dark behind a second collapse because she was the one who did the arithmetic and understood no one was coming. And then someone had come into her head and said take my hand. Franklin had heard the story three times and cried at a different part each time.

Now she was sitting in a bunk house on the ground, alive, small, with her hands folded in her lap in a way that was much too neat for eight, and when the room started to break up into kids talking to liaisons about doors, she did not move, and Franklin went and sat down next to her, on the floor, six feet away, which was a distance he had learned from watching people who were better at this than he was.

"You already picked," Franklin said. It was not a question. He could feel it off her, the settledness, the decision already made and held tight.

"Door three," said Sella.

"The Vulcans."

"They don't ask." She said it very quietly, and very precisely, the same way Marky had said Vulcans would want him to be honest. "The man said they don't ask how you feel. They just teach you things and let your insides be your own. I did the arithmetic on all four doors and door three is the one where nobody ever makes me talk about the ship. I would like to learn a great many things and never once talk about the ship. That is the exact thing I want and I did not know I was allowed to want an exact thing until this morning and I am - " her precise little voice wobbled, just once, and steadied - "I am keeping it. The wanting. I found out I could have an exact want and I am not going to lose it. Door three."

"Door three," Franklin agreed, softly, and did not touch her, and did not tell her that the Vulcans would, very slowly, over years, without ever once asking, teach her that her insides were survivable, because that was hers to find out and not his to spoil. "For what it's worth, I think you picked exactly right. And you can change your mind and you won't, and both of those are true, and the Vulcans would appreciate that they're both true at once. It's a very door-three thing to be."

Sella looked at him.

"You're the warlock," she said. "The one who feels things."

"I'm the warlock who feels things."

"Can you feel that I picked right?"

"Yes," said Franklin, honestly, because she was door-three and she would know a soft lie and hate it. "You picked right. It's the cleanest thing in this whole room. You did the arithmetic again and this time it came out to a future. That's the best kind of arithmetic there is."

Sella nodded, once, satisfied, a small girl who had checked her math and found it held, and went to go tell the liaison named Dan that she was door three and would like the hard one and did not want anyone to make it easier.

Max

Max Dax had come with Bradley, and Max Dax could not pick a door.

Franklin knew who he was. Everyone did, quietly. The boy Bradley had adopted out of a house nobody talked about, the younger of the two Dax brothers, the one the doctors used a word for that Franklin had heard Marky use exactly once and then refuse to use again because he did not like what it did to his own mouth. Fifteen, tall, brown eyes, and he stood at the edge of the room next to the four doors like a person standing at the edge of a frozen lake that had already taken people he knew.

Marky had not pushed him. That was the first thing Franklin clocked, and it made him love Marky a little more, because Marky had laid out four doors to a room full of frightened kids and had watched Max Dax go grey and had simply not pushed, had let the others choose around him, had left him at the edge with the offer sitting in the air not-expiring.

Franklin went and stood near him. Not too near. He did not sit this time; Max was too tall and too braced for the floor, it would have read as a trap.

"You don't have to," Franklin said.

"I know." Max's voice was very controlled. "Bradley said. He said whichever, or none, or later. He keeps saying later's a real answer." He was looking at the four doors like they were four different ways to die. "It's not, though. Later's not a real answer. Later just means the picking is still coming."

And Franklin, who was an empath, who could not help being an empath, felt the shape of it come off Max Dax and had to hold his own face still, because he had felt a lot of terrible things in a lot of rescued kids and this one had a shape he had never felt before. It was not fear of the doors. It was fear of the wanting. Somewhere behind the tall braced boy there was a lesson, an old one, taught carefully, that said the thing you want is the thing that gets taken, that to reach for a door is to paint a target on it, that the safest thing a person can possibly do is want nothing at all so there is nothing to lose and nothing to be punished for reaching toward. Franklin did not know the details. He did not want them. But he could feel the shape, and the shape was a boy who had been taught, thoroughly, expertly, that choosing was fatal.

He did not offer Max combat training. He was proud of himself for that, later.

"Okay," Franklin said. "Then I'm going to tell you the true thing, and you can check it against whatever you've got in you that says I'm lying, because I can feel that you've got something in you that says everyone's lying, and it's a smart thing to have, keep it. The true thing is this. The doors don't want anything from you. That's what's different. Every other time you picked something, or wanted something, there was a person on the other end of it keeping score, and the wanting cost you, or cost somebody. Right?"

Max did not answer. His jaw moved.

"These four doors don't keep score. Nobody's on the other end of them counting what you reach for. If you pick door three because it's the safest and the Vulcans won't pry, nobody writes that down as a weakness and uses it. If you pick door four because you want to be bored in Ohio, nobody's storing that up. And - here's the part I'd bet my hair on, and my hair is a species trait, so I don't bet it lightly - if you pick nothing, if you stand here at the edge for a month, a year, if you never pick a door at all, the total price of that is nothing. Marky will keep the doors open the exact same amount whether you walk through one tomorrow or never. He built the whole place so that not-wanting is free. You're standing in the one building in any universe where wanting costs nothing and not-wanting costs nothing and both of those are the actual policy, in writing, and Beverly will still give you a cookie either way."

Max looked at him for a long time.

"That can't be a place," he said finally. "A place like that isn't - somebody built a place where wanting's free? On purpose?"

"An eleven-year-old with a pizza obsession built it on purpose," said Franklin. "I know. It undid me too. It still does. I've been coming here for weeks and every time I walk in and it's still true I get suspicious all over again. You never really stop getting suspicious. You just get suspicious from the inside instead of the outside, which turns out to be the difference between a wall and a home, and nobody warns you about that part."

Something moved in Max's face. Not a decision. Franklin could feel that it was not a decision; it was much smaller than a decision, and much larger.

"There's a window," Max said. "In the little classroom you can see through the door. Door two, the screen one. There's a window next to it, looks out at the horses."

"There is."

"If I did door two," Max said, very slowly, testing each word for a trap the way a person crosses ice, "the screen one, the one where nobody can see me if I don't want. Could I - is it allowed, could I do it from that seat. The one by the window. With the horses."

And Franklin, who did not touch him, who did not cheer, who kept his own enormous surge of feeling entirely off his face because Max Dax would have felt it and bolted, said, in the most ordinary voice he owned:

"Yeah. That's allowed. That's a completely allowed thing to want. I'll tell Dan you're door two, window seat, horses. He'll write down the window seat like it's as important as the door, because here it is."

Max Dax had picked a want the size of a window seat, in a room where he had been braced to have wanting used against him, and the ceiling had not fallen, and Franklin watched him stand very still and wait for it to fall, and it did not fall, and Max breathed out for what looked like the first time all morning.

It did not fix him. Franklin knew better than to think it fixed him. There was a whole boy in there with a whole terrible education still installed, and a window seat did not delete a single lesson of it. But he had wanted one small thing out loud, in front of witnesses, and survived it, and that was not a cure and it was never going to be a cure.

It was a first want that didn't kill anybody. In that house, apparently, that was everything.

Sparkles Votes

Sparkles arrived halfway through the afternoon, the way Sparkles arrived everywhere, which was to say enormously and without warning and to the total non-reaction of everyone who knew Franklin and the total astonishment of everyone who didn't.

"That's a tiger," said the flat-voiced boy from the back, who had chosen door one, Mountain Oaks, "because the tiger's at that one," and had been visibly pleased with himself about it ever since.

"That's Sparkles," said Franklin. "He's mine. He's a construct. He picks who needs him and there's no arguing with him about it, I've tried, I have no authority over him whatsoever, he came through a collapsing dimension with me and formed his own opinions."

Sparkles paced the length of the bunk house once, unhurried, past nine kids who had each just chosen or not-chosen a future, and Franklin watched him do the thing he did, the reading, the picking, and Franklin thought he knew where the tiger was going and the tiger surprised him, the way he always did.

Sparkles walked past Sella, who had picked door three, and gave her one enormous approving headbutt that nearly knocked her over and made her laugh out loud, the first laugh anyone had heard from the girl who did the arithmetic.

And then he went and lay down, all four hundred pounds of summoned tiger, not in front of Max, which is what Franklin expected, but a little to the side of him, near the window that looked out at the horses, in the exact seat Max had named. He put his enormous head down on the sill. He did not look at Max. He did not require anything of Max. He just took the window seat, and warmed it, and lay there being a large uncomplicated fact in the shape of a tiger, holding the spot, so that when Max Dax finally walked over on legs that did not entirely trust the floor and sat down in the seat he had dared to want, there was already something there that had wanted it too, and asked him for nothing, and did not keep score, and would not move.

"He's in my seat," Max said.

"He's keeping it warm," said Franklin. "He'll share. He's terrible at boundaries. It's his best quality."

Max Dax sat down next to a tiger in a window seat he had chosen, in a building where wanting was free, and looked out at the horses, and did not say anything else, and did not have to.

Beverly came through twenty minutes later with a tray, and gave everyone a cookie, the door-ones and the door-twos and the door-threes and the two kids who had picked door four and wanted to be bored in a town nobody had picked yet, and she gave one to Max, and she gave one to the tiger, who ate it, and she pretended none of it was special, even though she had a four-year degree and knew exactly, precisely, to the ounce, how special it was.

Authors Note:

A quiet one, and I wanted it that way. After the last chapter I owed these kids a morning where the biggest thing that happened was a choice, and where the choice was real. Four doors, all of them open, all of them paid for, and a room full of children who mostly had never once been asked what they wanted finding out that the asking was the whole gift. Sella wants to learn everything and never talk about the ship, and the Vulcans are exactly right for that, and they'll teach her more than geometry without ever telling her they're doing it. And Max - Max wanted a window seat. That's all. In the house I am not going to describe, wanting a thing was the most dangerous act a child could commit, and he wanted a window seat out loud and the ceiling held. It doesn't fix him. Nothing fixes anybody in these stories; you know that by now if you've read the others. They don't get healed. They get a window seat, and a tiger who won't move, and a cookie nobody makes them earn. This is not a cliffhanger - the Cliff Hanger Police are, I'm told, still recovering from the last two, and I am giving them the afternoon. Jena Waterloo is still out there, and I have not forgotten her, and neither has Trent. But that's a different door, and today was for the ones already inside. Have fun reading.