Episode 4 — The Hot Mic

By two o’clock Della needed one minute alone, and she had begun to believe there was nowhere in Greenwood Municipal Zoo to have it.

She had led the morning. She had shared a path with a swan, taken a mud treatment she had not chosen, and negotiated the release of her own admit card from a monkey, all of it serene, all of it on camera, and it had cost her something she could not name and could not show. The uniform had gone from white to grey to a colour that no longer had a name. Her collar was bent, her hem was stiff, her breast pocket held a chewed card, and every part of her wanted, for sixty seconds, to stop holding her face in the shape she had held it since nine that morning.

So while the class watched the sea lions being fed, she slipped away up a side path, looking for a tap, a wall, a corner, any place a girl could sponge her sleeve and be, for one minute, nobody at all.

The path ended at a low building with a door standing open, and a hand-written sign that said OFFICE, and inside it was empty. There was a desk, a chair, a fan turning slowly, a sink in the corner with an actual tap, and a long grey console on the desk covered in switches, the kind of thing a municipal zoo installs once, in a hopeful year, and never quite maintains. There was no keeper. There was no one. Greenwood guarded its swans more carefully than its office.

Della went in. She ran the tap and wetted a paper towel and pressed it to the mud on her forearm, and the mud did not come off, it only spread, going from a stain to a smear, and she stood at the sink in the ruined uniform and looked at herself in the small mirror above it, at the bent collar and the flat held face, and for the first time since the bus she let the face go.

And then, quietly, to the empty room, to the mirror, to nobody, she said what she thought.

“I hate them,” she said. She said it the way you say a thing you have been carrying all day. Low. Even. Almost gentle. “I hate the swan. I hate the mud. I do not think mud is skin insulation, I think it is mud, and I think it smells, and I have it in my hair. I do not want to read a monkey’s intentions. I want a floor. I want one clean, flat, ordinary floor with nothing living on it.” She pressed the useless paper towel to her collar. “I am not at home in the natural world. Nobody is at home in the natural world. The natural world is where things get on you. I want a letter from a woman who thinks I love owls, and then I want to go to a city, and live on a high floor, and never touch soil again as long as I live.”

She leaned on the desk to say the last of it. She put her weight on it, both hands flat, the way she had leaned on the rail that morning, and she had learned nothing from the rail, because her left hand came down on the long grey console, on a switch worn smooth by an old hopeful year, and the switch went down with a small definite click, and a red light she had not noticed came on.

Greenwood Municipal Zoo had one thing that worked perfectly, and it was the public-address system.

Her voice came out of the speaker on the office wall, half a second behind her, loud and clear and low, and she heard it, and she understood, and she took her hand off the console, and it was already too late, because the speaker on the office wall was one of forty speakers on forty poles across the whole of Greenwood, and every one of them was carrying her, at full municipal volume, to the sea lion pool and the monkey island and the hippo wallow and the gate and the car park and the three hundred students and the families with small children and the keepers and Mrs. Vance and the phone.

“…want a letter from a woman who thinks I love owls,” said Greenwood Municipal Zoo, in Della’s low, honest, carrying voice, to everyone, “and then I want to go to a city, and live on a high floor, and never touch soil again as long as I live.”

The fan turned. The red light stayed on. Somewhere far off across the zoo, carried faintly back to her on the afternoon air, she heard the specific sound of three hundred people going quiet at once, which is louder than three hundred people making noise.

Della stood very still in the empty office, one hand still raised where it had left the switch, and looked at the small red light, and did not move, because there was, this time, nothing serene to say. There was no sentence in her whole three-month stock that covered this. She had said the true thing at last, clearly, to everybody, and the true thing was out over the poles and gone, and it could not be taken back or turned into a treatment or traded away for half a banana.

The red light went off by itself, on a timer, the way things at Greenwood did what they did without reference to anyone.

Della lowered her hand.

She looked in the small mirror one more time, at the girl in the ruined uniform who had finally, accidentally, been heard, and then she straightened her bent collar with two fingers, out of habit, because the habit was all she had left, and she walked to the office door and out into the sun to go and be, in front of the whole of Class 12 and every stranger in Greenwood, exactly the person she had spent three months and one entire day pretending not to be.

The path back was very long. She met the class at the top of it.

They were all looking at her. Every one of them. Mrs. Vance was at the front, and her face, for the first time all day, had nothing on it that Della could read, not belief and not the almost-belief, just a woman who had heard a loudspeaker.

And Siddharth, at the edge of the crowd, lowered his phone all the way down, and put it in his pocket, and for the first time all day he did not need it, because this time everyone had heard it live.