Rae and the New World

One day, the sun rose in the west and set in the east, just like any other day. And, just like any other day, Gilly Jenkins tried her darndest to make Rae’s life hell.

“People aren’t any nicer in this world than they were on Earth,” Rae’s father sighed, by way of consolation, when she first told him she was being bullied. His comment did little to soothe her, as this was the world Rae knew, not Earth. Her parents tried their best to inject normality into her life here, while continuing to compare it to a previous one, which she couldn’t relate to at all. What had been the point of their mission to come to this planet if all they did was compare the New World to the old world? Rae had thought bitterly.

But this was two years later, and Gilly’s sniding remarks had become incessant. It didn’t help there were few others she could focus her attention on. Then again, Rae knew, few others had attributes that made them as easy a target as herself.

“Ali! HEY, ALI!” Forcing herself not to turn around, Rae continued walking towards the conservatory on the school grounds for her first class of the day, well aware she was the one being yelled at by the all-too familiar voice. “Hey, Ali!” Gilly repeated, from somewhere behind Rae. Gilly ran to catch up to her and fell into a walk beside her once she had, breathing heavily, and edging to see Rae’s reaction. “Like your new nickname?” she pressed. Without turning to look at Gilly, Rae knew she was smirking at her own hilarity. Gilly had outdone herself, Rae thought dully; ‘Alien’ had become ‘Ali’. Rae quickened her stride without responding, wishing Dr. Fontall would appear before Gilly really got going. But Gilly wasn’t so easily deterred. “I heard you were bugged the other day,” she said with triumph. Rae’s heart fell; she hated when others knew about the tests and trials she underwent. Gilly’s father worked at the lab, she remembered miserably. Again, Rae chose not to reply. Gilly took her silence as confirmation, and continued. “Should you even be coming to school right now?” she asked in mock seriousness. Her voice carried a deep scorn intermingled with a barely-suppressed glee, as though her revelation was proof of her superiority over Rae.

Rae kept her eyes fixed ahead and pursed her lips, continuing her march towards the conservatory. Gilly lent closer to Rae, keeping pace, and lowered her voice, now trying to sound more matter-of-fact. “You’re diseased now, you know. Aren’t you worried you’re going to turn into, like, a hybrid mutant or something? You’re an alien bugged with human diseases—”

“SHUT UP” Rae snapped, rounding on Gilly as Dr. Fontall walked out from the entrance to the conservatory. There was a long pause as the other students that had been straggling behind hastened to join Rae, Gilly and Dr. Fontall, who was frowning at the two now-silent girls in front of him, wary of injecting himself into whatever pubescent drama he had interrupted. 

Rae was seething, but tried to remain calm as the group coalesced around her for entry into the conservatory. Once everyone had gathered, Dr. Fontall led the group inside the stuffy solarium. Gilly kept quiet, unwilling to continue harassing Rae in such close proximity to a teacher.

As they settled into their regular seats in the classroom, Rae thought to herself that maybe this was why she liked school; at least with teachers around, Gilly was forced into being slightly less of a bully. School also gave Rae a chance to prove herself more than just A Baby That Survived.

The humidity of the classroom made her feel dull and she quickly lost herself in her thoughts; another luxury when she was wasn’t being teased, or poked and prodded with medical equipment by the doctors.

As Rae saw it, the thing with being the first extra-terrestrial human baby, was that it made your life a bit of a drag. The sheer amount of tests she had been subjected through infancy, childhood and now her teenage years made Rae feel like a walking specimen. All the other babies born after her in the New World were tested as well, of course, but none more than Rae, who was the first to hit each milestone in this new environment.

Puberty had been one such milestone. Embarrassing though getting her first period was, it reached a new level of humiliation when she was placed in a sterile room surrounded by the doctors she had known since birth asking her how she felt and taking samples of her menstrual blood, unable to contain their bubbling intrigue into the fact that her reproductive system seemed to work just like any other woman’s.

It wasn’t uncommon for Rae to miss weeks of school to be part of these longitudinal studies and tests, and last week she had been monitored after receiving a series of injections of small amounts of Earth-borne diseases to build up her resistance to them, should they ever be introduced to the New World through another wave of colonisers. It was a process the kids called “bugging,” though her dad told her it was not a new process, but rather, one that had been long established on Earth under a different name. It had controversially lost favour in the old world and led to a series of plagues that sparked the movement to seek the New World. Rae, as usual, was the first to receive these injections in the New World. The older children, like Gilly, had received them as babies prior to leaving Earth.

“Astraea?” Dr. Fontall called from the front of the class, breaking Rae’s reverie. She jumped, but then raised her hand; “present.” She caught a glimpse of Gilly across the room straining around in her seat to look back at her, shaking her head and mouthing ‘Ali.’

It seemed ‘Ali’ was going to stick for a while, Rea thought glumly, as Dr. Fontall continued with the roll call – “Sylvia?” “Present” “Charles?” “Present”.

As unwanted nicknames went, Rea placated herself, at least Ali was bearable. It wasn’t like her real name was much better than anything Gilly’s imagination could conjure up anyway. Her parents had thought it poetic to name her after a part of the asteroid belt they had survived crossing to reach the New World. They said Astraea meant resilience, but as Rae saw it, she had been named after a rock.

Rea distracted herself for the rest of the lesson on foreign plant biology on learning the growth pattern and useable properties of the new species of lettuce they would be producing in the greenhouses, and then at the end of class, she was the first out of the door, trying to get at much distance between herself and Gilly.

For the rest of the day, Rae avoided Gilly as best she could. She spent her lunch period in the library getting ahead on her homework, resenting the fact that Gilly had driven her to hiding out and isolating herself.

Astronomical science that afternoon was a drag as usual. Dr. Fosseu was talking about the future of human colonisation on other nearby planets and how resources would need to be modified to acclimate to these different corners of space.

It was a subject that everyone in class could grasp easily; all having been part of this great human experiment to colonise the New World. But Rae felt it was something she had more of an affinity with than others. To her, the concept of space conjured notions of vast emptiness and loneliness that she could understand well. At the same time, however, it had been space exploration and discovery that had made her unique—a target for people like Gilly—which she resented.

Coming through the front door of her home later that afternoon, Rae tossed her backpack on the floor with her dirt-worn desert boots, and headed straight to the kitchen for a snack. Her father looked up from working on his laptop at the kitchen table. “How was school?” he asked.

“The usual,” Rae murmured, her face hidden by the open pantry door.

“The usual good, or usual bad?”

“Do I really have to go into the details of it?” Rae said flatly as she reemerged from the pantry. “It was just school.” She went to leave the room.

“Rae,” her father called her back. 

“Da-ad, I’ve got homework,” she said testily, and turned to leave the room again.

“Is Gilly still giving you a hard time?” 

Rae turned back, taken aback, not for the first time, by how perceptive her father was. She tried to force a reassuring tone, but her voice cracked. “It doesn’t matter.” Lowering her head, she muttered, “Gilly’s fine.” She suddenly wanted to run to her room and cry.

“Rae, come here,” her father said softly. She dragged her feet towards him and fell into his open arms. He hugged her close and she breathed in his familiar scent. Slowly spreading through her body like cocoa, she began to feel more secure and content.

With her head still pressed against his chest, Rae’s father spoke again. “People like Gilly are only mean to others because of something they recognise as missing themselves. It doesn’t give them an excuse to hurt you, but it does help you to see how they have been hurt themselves.” Rae didn’t think Gilly deserved any sympathy, but neither was she ready to leave her father’s warm embrace, so she nodded mutely and he took that as permission to continue. “When Gilly first arrived in the New World, and during the long journey to get us all here, she was the youngest person,” he said. “She was part of all the tests and trials and received the attention you’ve been getting all your life. It was all she knew, until you were born and the attention was shifted towards you. Now I know”—he said, interrupting Rae’s dissent—“you didn’t ask for that, but that could explain some of her nastiness towards you. It’s plain jealousy.”

Rae didn’t appreciate her father’s simplification of all Gilly’s taunts and teasing into a single, trivial reason like this. The way she saw it, Gilly was welcome to take the attention back from her; she didn’t want it. Rae would have traded places with her in an instant if it meant she could have some berth on humanity’s natural planet, and not on this one, which for all its regularity to her, remained foreign to those adults that had colonised it, including, she knew, her father. But Rae was an inextricable part of this New World; its first natural citizen, born and raised. Rae loved her father deeply, but despite their shared biology, there would always be this invisible, but massive, difference between them.

She slouched off to busy herself in her room, reappearing only when her mother called her for dinner.

It was their routine at dinner time to discuss what Rae had learned at school that day and what new developments at been made at the engineering plant where both her parents worked. This was how it was that night too, illuminating but mundane; just another discussion across the table with her mother and father.

Once the dinner plates were scraped and washed clean, Rae returned to her bedroom and got to readying her things for the next day at school. She packed her bag and laid out her clothes and brushed her teeth.

Rae watched the sun dip below the horizon to the east through her window as she pulled on her pajamas and crawled into bed. It was the end of just another ordinary day for her in the New World, she thought to herself as she eventually nodded off.