Free M. T. Anderson by Feed

shows about how other people live normally, and she really wanted to live like the rest of us. So she and her other home-schooling friends had tried to copy us. For example, he said she couldn’t have toy guns, because they were against his beliefs, so she had to pick up anything — pieces of wood or bent metal — and use them like a toy gun, and pretend it was just as good as a real one made of plastic.
    I was afraid that she would be too smart for me, but she wasn’t. I don’t mean she wasn’t smarter, because she was, but just that there was so much she hadn’t done. She was like a little kid, all excited when I was just meeting her at the mall for the day, and we walked from store to store or went on the air slides or shopped underwater. She had hardly ever done any of it before. She was always new.
    We sat in the mall and made up stories about people who passed by. Shoppers walked around us on the concourses, their mouths moving, talking to people who weren’t there. They were all muttering.
    We made up stories about how they’d given birth to monsters in attics.
    We went into stores, and we laughed and laughed.
    It was like she took my hand, or I took her hand, and we ducked through doorways, and together we went to an old place, and it was a new place.
    We went there holding hands.

Okay, but sometimes, though, I did get worried that she was too smart for me.
    I don’t do too good in School™. We were back in School™, so I was reminded pretty often that I was stupid.
    School™ is not so bad now, not like back when my grandparents were kids, when the schools were run by the government, which sounds completely like, Nazi, to have the government running the schools? Back then, it was big boring, and all the kids were meg null, because they didn’t learn anything useful, it was all like,
da da da da, this happened in fourteen ninety-two, da da da da, when you mix like, chalk and water, it makes nitroglycerin,
and that kind of shit? And nothing was useful?
    Now that School™ is run by the corporations, it’s pretty brag, because it teaches us how the world can be used, like mainly how to use our feeds. Also, it’s good because that way we know that the big corps are made up of real human beings, and not just jerks out for money, because taking care of children, they care about America’s future. It’s an investment in tomorrow. When no one was going to pay for the public schools anymore and they were all like filled with guns and drugs and English teachers who were really pimps and stuff, some of the big media congloms got together and gave all this money and bought the schools so that all of them could have computers and pizza for lunch and stuff, which they gave for free, and now we do stuff in classes about how to work technology and how to find bargains and what’s the best way to get a job and how to decorate our bedroom.
    It was still hard, there were some times when none of us did good, and I felt stupid, and we all felt stupid, and Loga and Calista were like,
Omigod! This is so dumb!
    Could the teacher be any more, please, condescending?
    Omigod, I know. Like, thanks for the heapin’ helpings of yawn banquet.
    And I sat there with my palms pressed into my forehead, thinking about Violet, at home, being smart. I would think about some conversation we were having where I was dumb.
    Like she was always reading things about how everything was dying and there was less air and everything was getting toxic. She told me about how things were getting really bad with some things in South America, but she couldn’t really tell exactly how bad, because the news had been asked to be a little more positive. She said that it made her frightened to read all this kind of thing, about how people hated us for what we did. So one time I said to her that she should stop reading it, because it was just depressing, so she was like,
But I want to know what’s going on,
so I was like,
Then you should do something