Free One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy by Stephen Tunney Page B

was obvious by the silence they fell into. The other students were staring at them. Her hands were still in fists. The lenses over their eyes prevented the subject from progressing. He savored this sight of her…

    He was about to confess that everything in his life revolved around her, and
Ha, I’ll bet you didn’t know that, Slue — I myself could not grasp it, not till now, the moment you stood, your fists clenched, the slow reactive movement of your hair, you spun, I revolved with you, I had no idea that I was your satellite, but I am, there is no gravity in my life without you...
    Hieronymus spoke in a voice she could hardly hear. He looked at the place where her shoes met the floor.
    “My mother stays in bed all day. And all she does there is cry.”
    Slue’s fists relaxed.
    “She’s done that for sixteen years. I’ve never had a conversation with her.”
    Her fingers extended and pointed to the floor.
    “She wears a raincoat to bed. A plastic raincoat.”
    Slue sat down.
    She looked straight ahead. He was all wound up. All his own details he kept to himself. She knew nothing about his mother — she had assumed his mother was gone. Dead, or far away on Earth; she never saw her, and she never asked because Hieronymus always behaved as if it was only himself and his father.
    The Regime of Blindness. She will tell him. He knows it’s true.
    Slue sat there for a long time looking at him. Through his goggles, she saw him blink both his eyes. She knew he was not looking at anything, and she waited for him to speak again, and his lips did move, but nothing came out. He reached up and brushed something imaginary from his hair. He was about to apologize, but he couldn’t.
I’m sorry, I’m just jealous, those boys don’t have goggles covering their eyes...
    Dear Hieronymus, I did not know this about your mother. It was your secret. I have a secret, too. But I can’t tell you. Not yet. It’s about my older brother, Raskar. You remember him? He lives in the District of Copernicus. He’s an attorney, and he works in the Lunar Federal Court, and he has accidently discovered some things that are unimaginable. Things that have direct consequences for you and I. What the government and its corporate partners are doing. My parents are terrified that he is going to get arrested, but they are even more terrified of what may happen to me if his ear and eye on the truth are disrupted. He has joined an underground society, secretly gathering evidence that all is not right here on the Moon. All is not right, but one thing is for certain: The lies began when they told us all we can never look at each other. That’s what they fear the most. You and I, and others like us, looking at each other.

    Eventually, she asked him a question. It had to do with their project.
    “You really aren’t reading
The Random Treewolf
, are you?”
    Hieronymus shook himself out of his wandering mind. Of course. Their school project. His page was still illuminated and hanging in midair only inches away, next to her page. The texts were entirely different.
    “It was a surprise I wanted to show you. We really are reading the same book by the same author, but…” He paused. “My copy is a direct translation of the original edition. What we have in the library here in school is the standard version that students have been studying for at least one hundred and thirty years. I found out that this book has been ‘updated’ three hundred and forty-eight times in the past nine hundred years.”
    Slue was astonished, and she reacted in her usual manner whenever she was astonished at anything — she shrugged her shoulders with a noncommittal “So?”
    “It is a completely different book,” he replied. “It is evidence of the crime of ‘updating’.”
    “The crime of ‘updating’?” she whispered. With her stylo-point, she flipped the book imagery back to the title page. It read:
The Random Treewolf
by Naac Koonx (Natalie Koolmahn)