UnBound - Neal Shusterman Page 0,3

table. It must be done, or at least deeply carved into, by the time his father gets home from work, unless he wants the next iteration of the Lecture. The lecture is always the same: all about how lucky he is to be in a corporate school at all, and how if his grades don’t improve, they’ll pink-slip him. “And then what?” his father would rant. “Without a corporate school, you’ll have no future. You won’t be any better than a feral!”

All the disgust in the world is packed into the word “feral” whenever his father says it—as if the feral kids are the source of all the world’s problems. Jasper can’t remember a time before there were ferals. The public schools failed even before the war started, leaving millions of kids with nothing to do but cause trouble for the system that put them out on the street. Nowadays only rich kids and corporation babies get an official education. Jasper is the latter: His father works for a huge shipping conglomerate, which guarantees Jasper’s place in the company’s educational program.

Unless, of course, Jasper gets pink-slipped.

He’s both terrified and enticed by the idea of expulsion. Maybe then Alph would see him as more than just a schoolie.

As he slaves over his homework, he begins to wonder what it was like in the old days, when education was a right, not just a privilege. He wonders if school sucked as much then as it does now.

He’s still working feverishly on algebra when his father gets home. He thinks that his diligence will spare him his father’s disapproval, but it doesn’t. “Why do you work in the dark like this? You’ll ruin your eyes, and then what?”

Jasper wants to point out that it isn’t dark in the dining room; it’s just that outside it’s still light, and his father’s eyes haven’t adjusted to being indoors, but Mr. Nelson is not a man who suffers contradiction easily—especially when he’s tired, and he looks exceptionally tired today. So Jasper just turns on more lights, wondering if he’ll get a lecture later that night about wasting electricity. You’ll bankrupt us with utility bills, and then what?

His father loves to lecture, and the angrier he is, the longer the lecture goes. Only once did he become physically violent with Jasper. Jasper had gotten suspended for cursing at a math teacher who deserved it, and that night his father blew like a volcano, throwing Jasper hard enough to crack the drywall. Then his father cried and begged forgiveness. Jasper knew this type of thing is rarely a one-time occurrence. In most cases it becomes a pattern—as it is for several of his friends, whose high-stress parents see their kids as the only available pressure valve. But it won’t become a pattern if Jasper never gives his father a reason to hit him again. Or at least not until he’s escaped to a place of safety. Where kids protect each other.

At dinner his father will often complain about the state of the world or the morons in his office. He still goes off on diatribes about the teen “terror march” on Washington, long after it ended. Maybe because Jasper once commented that he would have liked to have seen it. But tonight his father doesn’t voice any opinions at dinner. He doesn’t complain about work or about traffic or about anything. Jasper noticed he seemed tired, but it’s more than that. He’s quiet, distracted, and noticeably pale.

His mother doesn’t say anything. Instead she leaves his father’s medication on the counter, just in case he might forget to take it. Jasper can’t stand a dinner table where the only sounds are the scraping of silverware on china. Even a lecture would be better than that. If no one will say anything, he has to.

“Is it your heart, Dad?” he asks. There are times he wishes his father would just keel over and die, but when that actually seems like a possibility, Jasper hates himself for thinking that and gets terrified that it might actually happen.

“I’m fine,” his father says, as Jasper knew he would—but now the door’s been opened for discussion, and his mom takes over.

“Maybe you should get in to see the doctor.”

“It’s indigestion,” his father says, a bit louder. “I’m not an idiot; I can tell the difference.”

Jasper scrapes himself a forkful of peas and speaks without looking up at him. “Indigestion doesn’t make your lips turn blue.”

His father puts down his silverware with a clatter. “What