Rite of Passage

Jimmy and I had been outside for twenty minutes, Riggy for forty. We recovered our equilibrium in a bare few minutes, but Riggy could do nothing but sit and look miserable and hold his head.

When I threw up, Venie looked down at it and then up at me. “You’re going to have to clean that up,” she said. “I’m not.” Apparently she felt she’d had enough of the dirty work on this little adventure. I didn’t really blame her. I didn’t have the strength. All I did was just sit down and close my eyes and give blessings that I was back in the real world again, even including Venie.

Jimmy and Riggy and I just sat around and the other three threw questions at us. Jimmy told them how it was.

Riggy said weakly, “If anybody wants to go, I’ll give them this suit.”

“It’s hardly in shape for anybody to wear,” Helen said, and that was true. For all that he had stopped being racked by heaves, Riggy and the inside of his suit were in impossible shape.

Jimmy said, “We’d best get these things cleaned up and returned.”

We got Riggy out of his suit and Venie was delegated to see that he got home. Helen and Att took Riggy’s suit off to clean it up, and Jimmy and I cleaned up the lock room. I don’t know how Jimmy was able to keep his stomach from first to last, but he did. His iron constitution, I guess.

When everything was cleaned up, we left Att and Helen to close the lock room and go home. I had never realized before that adventures took so much doing, so much preparation and so much cleaning up afterward. That’s something you don’t see in stories. Who buys the food and cooks it, washes the dishes, minds the baby, rubs down the horses, swabs out the guns, buries the bodies, mends the clothes, ties that rope in place so the hero can conveniently find it there to swing from, blows fanfares, polishes medals, and dies beautifully, all so that the hero can be a hero? Who finances him? I’m not saying I don’t believe in heroes — I’m just saying that they are either parasites or they spend the bulk of their time in making their little adventures possible, not in enjoying them.

Cleaning up after ourselves coupled with the lefthanded direction everything had gone took the sparkle out of us. Jimmy and I just tossed the suits over our arms and said goodbye to Helen and Aft and went off toward Salvage. Things had gone so unswimmingly that I suppose I should have expected that they would continue that way. On our way, we ran into George Fuhonin. It was again a case of coming around a corner and not being able to avoid someone, though in this case we didn’t stumble over him. We simply turned the corner and found him close enough that we couldn’t ditch the suits or manage to go unseen.

“Hi, Mia,” he said from down the hall.

“Hello,” I said. “What are you doing down here?”

Jimmy looked up at the giant so uncertainly that I said, “It’s George Fuhonin. He pilots a scoutship — for my dad sometimes,” in an undertone.

“Oh,” Jimmy said.

“I was looking for you, I think,” George said as he came up. “I’m on constable call today and I had a complaint from a Mrs. Keithley in Engineers about two young cubs, a red-headed boy with ears that stick out-and I take it that’s you” — pointing at Jimmy — “and a black-haired little girl with bad manners. I’m not even making a guess as to who that is,” he said, looking meaningfully at me. “So perhaps we’d better go where we can talk, and while you’re about it, you might explain what you’re doing with those suits.”

“We were .returning them,” I said.

George looked at us quizzically.

The aftermath I don’t care to go into detail about. Mr. Mitchell was quite genuinely hurt to think he bad been used. I could tell that he was hurt when he handed each of us our pins, both of which turned out very nicely indeed.

That was at a meeting in Daddy’s office with Daddy, Mr. Mitchell, Miss Brancusik who was Jimmy’s dorm mother, and Mr. Mbele. They sat on one side of the room and Jimmy and I sat on the other. Mrs. Keithley wasn’t there, thank Heaven. The meeting was uncomfortable enough without her, too.

She entered the meeting — we were told to avoid her strictly from now on. I could see that Mr. Mitchell had been hurt, but I didn’t really understand why. It was spelled out for us. I had been looking at it from my point of view, that he was in our way and might have stopped us if we had just tried to ask for the suits. I hadn’t seen things from his angle at all. That we had used him the way you use a handkerchief. I’ve always thought more in terms of things than of people, and I’m sometimes slow to put myself in somebody else’s shoes. When I did, I wasn’t happy about what I’d done — which I think was Daddy’s intention.

They didn’t question us about who used the third suit, but they did point out how stupid and dangerous it had been for us to go outside.