Rite of Passage

I didn’t like standing on the edge, so I came to the lip on my knees and looked down at the river. It looked a long way down — a drop big enough to kill you, and after that distances are academic. At the base, there looked to be just room to stand and no more. As it had been explained to us, the two ropes would be tied in place here at the top of the bluff and then each of us would whip the ropes around our waists and step off the cliff backwards. Looking down, I didn’t exactly relish the idea. I moved back from the edge and then got to my feet.

“Well,” Mr. Marechal said, “who’s going to be the first to try it?”

Jimmy said, “Mia and I will.”

Mr. Marechal looked at me and I said, “Yes.” I didn’t like the thought of doing it, but if it was something expected of everybody and I was going to have to do it eventually, I didn’t mind doing it first and getting it over with.

The ropes were tied to trees and then passed around our waists, around the main ropes, and then back around the waists again. Mr. Pizzarro and Mr. Marechal demonstrated for everybody how this worked. The ends were finally dropped back between our legs and over the edge of the cliff to dangle just above the river. In effect, what we were doing was putting ourselves in a running loop that slid freely on the rope and then moving down the rope to the river.

At the signal, we stood with our backs to the river, the rope taut between us and our trees. I looked down at the river and sighed, then stepped backward off the edge. I let line pay out for a moment and then stopped it and swung in to come to a halt with my feet against the cliff-face, my body hanging in the loop from the tree on the cliff above. I was almost surprised that it worked. Then I pushed off again and went down another six or seven feet. This was not hard at all, and rather fun. I looked over at Jimmy and laughed. Then, almost before I knew it, I was at the bottom. The bank here was wider than it looked from above, four or five feet wide, and Jimmy and I landed at almost the same moment.

We pulled the ropes free and waved up at the people On top.

“It’s easy,” Jimmy called.

“It’s fun,” I said.

The ropes were snaked up again to the top of the bluff as we watched.

Jimmy said, “There’s no sense in staying down here. Let’s go across the river.”

We swam across again and then watched while the next pair rappelled down the cliff. We sat on the last completed part of the cabin, a slab doorstep.

As we watched, I said, “Thank you for volunteering me, by the way.”

“I know,” Jimmy said. “You’re a reluctant daredevil. Aren’t you the person who used to crawl around in the air ducts?”

“That was different,” I said. “That was my idea.”

12

At the end of December, just in time for Year’s End, the kids on Trial on New Dalmatia were brought home. Of the forty-two kids who were dropped, seven didn’t signal for Pickup and didn’t come home. One of the seven was Jack Brophy, whom I’d known slightly in Alfing Quad. I thought about that, and I couldn’t help wondering whether I would come back to the Ship in a year. I didn’t dwell on the thought, though. Year’s End is the sort of holiday that takes your mind off the unpleasant, and besides I discovered something else that occupied my thoughts and gave rue something of a new perspective on my mother.

Year’s End is a five or six day bash — five days in 2198, which wasn’t a Leap Year. In one of the old novels I read, I discovered that before the calendar was reformed, the extra day of Leap Year was tacked onto February. (This was as part of a mnemonic that was supposed to help you remember how many days there were in each month. My adaptation of it for our calendar would go: “Thirty days hath January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December.” I have a pack rat memory — I even know what a “pack rat” was.) Under our system, the extra day gets tacked onto Year’s End.

I was in charge of fixing up our apartment for Year’s End. Jimmy and I made a trip down to the Ship’s Store on Second Level and picked out a piсata in the shape of a giant chicken and painted it in red, green and yellow. Jimmy’s dorm had a piсata, of course, but the impersonality of the dorm took a lot of fun out of Year’s End and I had arranged with Daddy for Jimmy to share ours. Between the two of us, Jimmy and I fixed the apartment very nicely and planned the parties we were having on Day Two (for our group of six and some of our other friends) and the big party on New Year’s Eve, more or less an open house for anybody who cared to walk in. Since that ticked off an obligation for Daddy, who has no patience for things like party arranging, he was just as glad to have us do it.