the theatre with him. I think he was frightened when he did and that surprised me. I’d always thought that he saw me as, at best, a brother-in-arms, and not as a girl at all.
The play was put on in the amphitheatre where they hold Ship’s Assembly, and we actually went to it instead of watching it on the vid. It was Richard B. Sheridan’s School for Scandal and except that I got a little sweaty in the palms of my hands, something that had never happened at home and that I can only attribute to my being excited, I enjoyed myself thoroughly.
I was excited all evening, too. When we got home, Jimmy took my hand and touched the palm with his finger.
“Your hand is sweaty,” he said.
I looked up at him and I nodded.
He said, “So is mine,” and he showed me, and it was.
Jimmy kissed me then. In spite of what they say, I was a little surprised. I had no idea that he wanted to, though I’d been hoping he would. It shows you what secret passions you can arouse. It was the first time anybody had ever kissed me like that and it made my heart pound and my hands sweat even more. Whatever I’ve forgotten, I’ve remembered that birthday.
It was almost as though Jimmy and I had invested something of ourselves because after that we had an unspoken understanding. Instead of carping at each other all the time, we only fought when we were mad. You can’t squabble in public with somebody you sometimes kiss privately, or at least I found I couldn’t. Of course I didn’t tell anybody. I wouldn’t want them to think I was changing.
Since I was now thirteen, Trial was less than a year away, but somehow I wasn’t quite as awed by the thought as I once had been. It no longer seemed as deadly a thing as it once had—though I did know that far from everyone returned. Survival Class gave me an amazing amount of confidence. For one thing, it made what we had to face more of a known quantity, and the unknown, unnameable, might-be-anything is always more frightening than the known. Trial was beginning to look more and more like thirty days among the Mudeaters—soonest begun, soonest done—and not much more, though there were some moments when I was surer of this than others. The moments when I wasn’t quite so sure that Trial would be a waltz usually came after one of the afternoons we spent watching various white-fanged this-and-thats come charging efficiently across the projection screen to slice down some galumphing creature three times their size, wham! But Survival Class also taught us to deal with completely strange things. Many didn’t seem to have very much to do with Trial, either. Dancing, needlepoint, parachuting. The thing is that once you’ve discovered that you can do a lot of strange and demanding things, and sometimes even do them well, then coping with the unknown doesn’t seem quite as hard. When they ask you to raise a log cabin, you don’t object that you never expect the opportunity to come up during Trial. You do it. You learn that you can do it. And you even learn one or two things that might come in handy.
In December, forty-two kids who were exactly a year older than we were, were scattered across the Western Hemisphere of New Dalmatia. They were dropped one at a time with horses and packs and no clear idea of where they were or what planet they were on, then got waved goodbye to. Also in December, about one week later, thirty-one of us kids went on a three-day field trip with Mr. Marechal and an assistant named Pizarro, also to New Dalmatia. The differences, of course, were that we knew where we were going, what we would find there, how long we were going to stay, and a few other nonessentials like that.
Four horses were taken, large draft animals. All of us kids came down to the scout bay with good shoes on our feet, heavy clothing, and backpacks. We’d been issued these when we started Survival Class. I’d outgrown my shoes, however, and been issued new pairs, and I was almost ready to ask for a larger set of clothes. As we went on board, I saw Mr. Pizarro and Mr. Marechal counting us off. They weren’t too obvious about it because there was that set idea of the voluntary nature