Back to Connor-sue.

There are campus security guards and teachers on patrol. Anyone seen walking away from school would draw the attention of everyone watching.

I really hate that this kind of thing is turning into the default setting for schools.
There are some places that do this, but that doesn’t mean everywhere does. And somewhere that’s used to mothers with kids would probably be kind of flexible – just pinch the baby so it starts screaming, then say you’ll go over there to calm it down. Connor comes because he’s the dad, and say that Lev is best at getting it calm and it’ll only take a few minutes. Unless they’ve completely remodeled schools, those places are generally pretty echoey, they probably don’t want you to go indoors that badly with a screaming baby. And that’s assuming anyone cares in the first place. We were allowed to mill about and wander all the way back to middle school. And given there’s a set way to deal with problem kids, I find it hard to believe a school would really need to work all that hard to wrangle their students.

It would, of course, really help if there was any description of their actual surroundings. My schools all bordered forest, so you could just circle the building, then make a break for it. If someone sees you, tearful explanation about leaf/bug/whatever homework that you forgot and you know you shouldn’t be doing it right now but but- We’ve established Risa’s good at bullshitting, if she sounds like she’s going to cry over not having her homework they should believe she’s one of the good kids who would don’t even consider skipping. And, of course, if there’s any nearby houses they can just claim they forgot their homework there and will be right back. Or that she forgot the baby’s bottle, that’d be best. It’s pretty obvious she doesn’t have the stuff on her, isn’t it?

On the other hand, my brother’s schools have been in more urban areas, which is probably trickier. I’d say claim you forgot breakfast and want to run over to the store to get a coffee whatever legal beverage kids drink to stay awake now.

Will this actually work? Well, you won’t know until you try. I’d say there’s a pretty good chance of it working, particularly because, as I said, with unwinding going on you’d expect most kids really would be well-behaved and so the odds of teachers assuming it was just an excuse to skip school is pretty low. Besides, if they wanted to skip school so badly they could’ve just not gone on the bus in the first place, and if they want to skip school without alerting anyone, they’d have to go in for homeroom first, so there’s no incentive there to run off in the first place. It’s only even an option for the gang because they weren’t supposed to be there.

But that’s not really the point. The point is they could try, because trying is interesting. And Connor knowing all the ins and outs of skipping would help with the question of why everyone thought he was such a discipline problem.

Now, it’s the future, so I’d expect a likely upswing in the use of security cameras. But it’s even more likely that those are used to document events, not to keep an eye out in real time, because there’s only so much money to go around.

None of this crosses their mind. The conversation is just Risa saying they can’t and Lev saying they should totally go in and then a teacher sees them so they go in.

“We’ll hide in a place where there aren’t any security cameras. The boys’ bathroom.”
“Girls’,” says Risa. “It’ll be cleaner, and there’ll be more stalls to hide in.”

What sort of idiot puts up security cameras and doesn’t use them to see who’s going into the bathrooms? Particularly a school where lots of the kids are getting pregnant, they should really want to discourage people sneaking off to fuck.

Connor’s grand plan is to wait until lunch, when the kids will head off to eat because school food sucks. My school just let seniors wander off any time they didn’t have class, so assuming teachers gave a fuck about getting you to homeroom, you could walk out as early as first period.

Risa points out this is a shitty plan because they have a baby and since it didn’t come out of her, she’s not going to be able to feed it.

If it starts crying in the bathroom, it will probably echo throughout the whole school.”

I’m telling you though, they must let mothers with annoying babies outside for exactly that reason. It’s not like babies have an actual off switch. If they want to cry, they’re going to. That’s why people shake them to death, which they should know about from the news if nothing else because I can’t imagine dumping babies on irritated strangers would do anything to improve that. There should be a shaken baby epidemic.

Connor’s great plan is just hope really hard it stays asleep. Or you could go try to find the nursery and ask if they have any formula. If they’re on the ball enough to notice that Risa doesn’t show signs of being pregnant, say they were just storked and no one in the house could take care of it. Or! They could even try to just abandon it there, since Risa at least is concerned about their inability to care for it. Plus again, it’d involve actually doing stuff, which is interesting, and it could serve to give us a better idea about how places function in the present day setting. It’d also have shown Connor’s decision as a bad one currently causing them trouble, instead of just talking about how it’d be bad.

So none of that will happen and it’s off to the bathroom. Apparently Connor did this to skip class all the time, so I guess he was kind of delinquentish by normal standards? Do people really do this? I mean, hiding out in the bathroom to do drugs or something, okay, but just sitting there for an hour? How is that less boring than class? I guess if you were doing it with your friends you could chat, but there’s no sign of Connor being particularly social. The one kid he seemed close to was his girlfriend, and I imagine if he was actually getting her to cut class her family would do more than just disapprove of how he personally isn’t going to amount to much.

They slip in after the first period bell rings

…what, do they not have homeroom in this place?

Connor explains bathroom hiding and how sometimes you should have your feet down and sometimes you should have your feet up and god I don’t care book. Bathrooms are not that interesting. Trying to bluff their way into getting the baby formula would’ve been interesting. Trying to bluff their way out of school would’ve been interesting.

They also take up three stalls, so how big is this bathroom? That seems like it’d cause a real jam.

Risa doesn’t believe this will work.

“You’d be surprised how long you can hide in a bathroom.”
“You mean you’ve done this often?” asks Lev, in the stall to his right.
Connor knows this fits right into Lev’s image of Connor as a bad seed. Fine, let him think that. He’s probably right.

Why the fuck would you spend all day in the bathroom? I mean, it’s not like Connor’s the book type, and there’s been no mention of handheld games or drugs. What on earth is left?

Also weirdly, I think this is the only thing the book doesn’t condemn. Colored eyes are evil. Scamming so you don’t starve is evil. Skipping class is fine? It’s like the author’s moral sense is based off stuff he conceivably could have done as a kid.

the baby coughs. Connor notices that it’s a quick, clean sound. Not sickly at all.

Because only certain coughs are a sign of illness. Doctor “Human Bite Wound? No Problem!” Connor knows all about this.

Man, what if Connor suddenly passed out from his probably septic by now bite? I mean, it’s not just that it’s a human bite, it’s a deep one into muscle near his torso. I think the only way this could be worse is if Lev had chomped directly onto his neck. The nurse would probably be too busy panicking to concern (her?)self with who he is, and they could get some valuable first aid and then have to run before the authorities get there.

Now it’s time for Connor to explain why he’s got baby issues. He says the kid said they’d already been storked before and that pushed him over the edge.

“So what?” says Risa. “Lots of people get storked more than once.”

“That’s what the official census data I read said, as well as the soap operas I watched! Because it’s not like I have any actual experience with this whatsoever, remember. Is it true that in suburbs there are unicorns and fairies?”

Lev chimes in as well that his family had three.

“What a wonderful family. They take in storked babies, and send their own flesh and blood to be unwound. Oh, sorry—tithed.”

Because clearly it’d have been more moral to murder the ones you aren’t related to.

storking’s in the Bible too.”
“No, it isn’t!”
“Moses,” says Lev. “Moses was put in a basket in the Nile and was found by Pharaoh’s daughter. He was the first storked baby, and look what happened to him!”

Uh, actually what happened to him was that the daughter then sent a servant out to find a woman to nurse the baby, and his actual mother volunteered and ended up employed to raise her own baby. Then later he turned on his adopted family like a viper. I mean, yes, he does try to resolve things in a non-firstchildmurder way first, but then his god turns around and keeps making the pharaoh refuse, and also he doesn’t ask for the pharaoh to let his people go for good, he makes up this bullshit story about wanting to go out temporarily for a holy day, and when he finally gets permission, all the Hebrews go around to their neighbors “borrowing” stuff they promise to return/pay back when they return. (It’s actually a lot weirder a story than you’d think.) Plus he gets readopted by another set of people in his original ethnicity before the whole burning bush thing and how does that fit in?

Also, she only did it because there was some proclamation to murder all Hebrew babies in the first place, and she kept him for several months first.

Also also, this is totally not the first baby abandoned by its mother. Did we also eliminate all history? Because this is the sort of shit that’s usually limited to religious homeschoolers, and we know Lev went to real school.

But I can absolutely see religion going this way. Doctrine has been built on way less. The biggest question is why anyone else would disagree, given Christianity’s the dominant religion in America. They must have been vocal about all the religious rationalizations for this, because god knows, there is nothing but concerted religious effort that could possibly have changed the cultural baseline so fast. If this was taking long after the original “compromise” and Christianity had worked hard to normalize this, Lev’s assertion would work great, but the problem is the other two should know it.

Anyway, Connor totally accepts Moses-was-storked as the answer despite apparently having never heard it.

“but what happened to the next baby she found in the Nile?”

I realize his point, but the correct answer is there was no next baby in the Nile because they were all dead because of the pharaoh ordering people to kill babies for some reason. Also, how can Connor not know the whole storking thing when he clearly recognizes the basic story?

Anyway, time for tragic backstory! When Connor was seven a baby showed up.

there were already two natural kids in the family. My parents weren’t planning on any more.

I think in a world with storking, people would kind of try to plan around that. Sort of like if you’re using one of the unreliable contraceptive methods, you don’t want to really rush toward your ideal number of kids because you know there’s a good chance of having an extra baby at any time.

What would work much better here is if they had Connor, were storked with his little brother, and figured they’d had all the kids they were going to have by then, only for a second storked baby to throw things off. Because not expecting to get storked even once does make you seem kind of stupid.

Anyway, his parents took the baby in, then next morning stuck it on someone else’s doorstep. So baby hot potato is a thing! This also shows why babies would indeed still end up in dumpsters. But then the other people don’t mention a baby, and eventually it ends up back on their doorstep two weeks later, and by then it’s sick and dies. That’s very sad, book, but also stupid and manipulative. Are you expecting me to believe that this is a magic baby that never cried once in two weeks? And that no one had the bright idea to drop it on someone’s doorstep, then call them to say “Oh, just noticed you’ve been storked!” Remember, no one can prove you did it, you’re not the birth mother after all!

It was coughing like a seal and its skin and eyes were yellow.”
“Jaundice,” says Risa, gently. “A lot of babies show up at StaHo that way.”

Also, I have no idea what the fuck is with this. Jaundice is just a thing that happens to babies. Bad jaundice can happen because of dehydration, but it can also be caused by breastfeeding. And it’s unlikely to be the dehydration because this baby must have been being fed well to have remained quiet. Unless the houses are soundproof, it must have spend its time with a bottle in its mouth. Also part of the cure for it is…sunlight. Which the baby would have been getting an unusual amount of compared to a regular baby.

I guess it could’ve gotten cold from being left out, but from the sounds of it people were taking it in again pretty quickly in order to hide that this was happening.

I think you could say the core problem here was that no one brought it to the hospital because they didn’t want to claim it, but if you’re already doing baby hot potato (with a magic never-crying baby), it’s not that much harder to abandon it at a hospital

If the idea is definitely that people could see the baby was sick and refused to take it, that needs to be stated more strongly. It’s entirely possible that in this world, hospitals are on watch for exactly this, so people really did deny the baby care for fear of being forced to keep it. But no one else seems to be paying any attention to what people with babies do, so it needs to be explained.

Here, it seems like the idea is just no one cared or paid attention, and it’s been getting passed around like a sweater no one wants.

Connor’s family does take the baby to a hospital. And it dies.

“I remember thinking, if a baby was going to be so unloved, why would God want it brought into the world?”
…
all Lev says is, “I didn’t know you believed in God.”

Because atheists don’t care about babies or the question of suffering. Everyone who’s good believes in a higher power, even if they’re not specifically affiliated with a church.

I suspect this bit is an attempt at fair and balancing it up. It is not a very good attempt. It does, though, show the core of why this book is so terrible at the issues. It’s evaluating abortion just on the basis of the baby’s wellbeing. Babies being murdered by evil whores is bad, but babies being abandoned by evil whores and dying is also bad! And, of course, the idea of any solution that allows those evil whores to have sex without consequences is out – dead babies may be sad, but not so sad to make condoms okay.

“Anyway, since it was legally ours, we paid for the funeral.

And here you have it, proof there are absolutely no legal ramifications for killing babies.

In America, when babies die, people want to know why the baby died. If the answer is “because the baby was sick and I didn’t feel like bringing it into the hospital”, we generally agree it’s your fault the baby is dead and treat you accordingly.

Now, his parents can obviously claim they had no chance to give the baby medical care earlier, so it isn’t their fault. But for that argument to work, the whole “legally theirs” thing can’t be as far-reaching as the author thought. The police would want to know who had the baby previously and prosecute them for causing the death by denying it medical treatment. This should have ended with a massive scandal as the whole neighborhood was sucked into it. They might ultimately decide to only charge the person who had it right before it ended up back with Connor’s family, or maybe one or two back, with actually being to blame for the baby’s death, followed by whatever consequences for baby hot potato there is getting slapped on everyone else.

Anyway, big funeral, no legal ramifications, Connor is all mad that everyone crying was part of baby hot potato because clearly they were just so lazy and irresponsible because that’s what it keeps coming down to.

I really believe that you have an obligation to help if you come across a situation where it’s needed. But – a baby is a really big deal. We know Connor was seven and that he has a younger brother. People usually have kids more than a year apart, so odds are, his brother was five or younger. His family had just finished raising a second little kid, and now they were facing raising a third. Who was caring for the kids during this time? Most families need two incomes to stay afloat these days, and I can’t imagine that’d have improved in this fucked up idiot world. One of them – by which I mean, obviously, the woman – would have needed to stay home to care for it for a while, and then either stayed longer or begun to pay for daycare, which is really, really pricey. Or, you know, yank your older kid out of school to make them care for it while you work. Remember how great those days were? No?

It’s bad enough getting pregnant and having a baby, but one dropped on your doorstep is so much worse. Normally, there’s a lot of time spent planning for it so you can schedule everything else around that issue.

And that’s assuming a healthy kid. The book doesn’t actually give a fuck about babies, so it probably doesn’t know this, but a lot of the babies people don’t want…they don’t come from healthy nineteen year olds who just happened to get pregnant. Twelve year olds don’t give birth to fat happy babies. Alcoholics and smokers don’t. Crack and heroin, while not having the severe long-term consequences people initially expected, still mean the baby needs a lot of initial care. STDs, which should be common enough given it seems condoms don’t exist, can infect the fetus or the baby upon birth. Just stress alone can cause all sorts of issues. And starving yourself (to, for example, hide the pregnancy, or just because you’ve got existing issues) can cause its own problems.

So it’s not just a baby you’re looking at caring for. It’s one that may need a great deal of medical care right out of the gate.

That’s just considering people like Connor’s family. Are all the adults in the neighborhood married and the same age? My grandmother loves babies, but she hasn’t been in good enough shape to actually care for one for at least a decade, maybe two. My aunt had a job where you had to work for quite a while before you got any benefits like time off, so if she had a baby end up on her doorstep that needed someone to stay home with it, she’d lose her job, particularly bad because she was already in a race to see if she could work long enough to get health insurance before her health problems kicked in. My older uncle has become extremely unreliable so while he has the time for a baby, he likely couldn’t care for it properly. Only my younger uncle even could deal with one, and it’d be a major hardship for him.

If it was left on our doorstep today? We could probably do it, at the cost of screwing up everything else in our lives and cutting off the rest of our extended family from any help because we’d be sinking everything we had into this.

But the author doesn’t understand this. In his world, babies are little morality lumps. They can be passed around for two weeks without crying once. They can be carted around a loud bus and louder school in silence, with the only problem being that, theoretically, it might start making noise if they don’t have food on hand.

“People shouldn’t give away babies that get left at their door,” Lev finally says.

Fuck you, Lev.

“People shouldn’t stork their babies,” Risa responds.

Fuck you too.

“People shouldn’t do a lot of things,” says Connor. He knows they’re both right, but it doesn’t make a difference.

No, they’re fucking not! We have a solution to this problem already, it’s abortion and all three of you fucking know it because it’s the underlying premise of this shitty, shitty book! People should not be forced to have babies they don’t want! The problem is not fucking irresponsibility!

In a perfect world mothers would all want their babies

WE HAVE THAT IT’S FUCKING ABORTION!

DO YOU KNOW HOW I KNOW MY MOM WANTED ME? BECAUSE I WOULDN’T EXIST IF SHE DIDN’T! DO YOU KNOW HOW I KNOW MY MOM WANTED MY BROTHER? BECAUSE HE WOULDN’T EXIST IF SHE DIDN’T!

PROBLEM. FUCKING. SOLVED.

In a perfect world everything would be either black or white, right or wrong, and everyone would know the difference. But this isn’t a perfect world. The problem is people who think it is.

Yes, the problem is this fucking author thinking that abortion is murder and then insisting that this makes everything else into a shade of grey problem because oh, what do you do with the inevitable babies?

…

Well, that digression is over with. Back to the actual plot, such as it is.

There’s the second-period influx of kids.

Unending squeals from the door and constant tugs on Connor’s locked stall door. No one’s tall enough to look over, no one has any desire to look under.

How bizarre. At least in elementary and middle school, I remember some kids would just lock the doors for the hell of it and leave the stall empty. Three locked stalls that stay locked the entire time, and no one thinks to check that there’s someone in there?

After the other kids go Risa suggests switching stalls because someone might notice her shoes being in the same one. Risa, if someone’s paying enough attention to recognize your shoes, I think they’ll recognize them one stall down instead.

And they discover Lev isn’t there.

And the baby begins wailing for all it’s worth.

FINALLY.