Jeremy's phone trilled as the bus rolled past the green of Lanark Park on one side of the street and the rival green of an old, old nursery on the other. His lips moved. His Adam's apple bounced up and down. All Amanda could hear was a faint mumbling with no real words. Like everybody else, she and Jeremy had learned to use throat mikes before they got out of elementary school.

She had to poke Jeremy when the bus stopped in front of the Safeway. “Apples!” she said. He nodded and got up. He kept right on talking while they got off the bus. Probably Michael, Amanda thought. He and her brother had been best friends since the second grade.

When she and Jeremy went into the store, he asked, “Did Mom's note to you say what kind of apples she wanted?”

“I wish!” Amanda exclaimed. “No-we're on our own.” You could have too many choices. Amanda saw that when she walked into the produce department. This was a big store, even for a Safeway. It tried to stock some of everything. As far as fruits and vegetables were concerned, it couldn't. It couldn't even come close. Still, as Amanda peeled a plastic bag off a roll, she looked at a couple of dozen different kinds of apples, all in neat bins.

She eyed red ones, golden ones, green ones, golden ones with reddish blushes, red ones streaked with gold, green ones streaked with gold. The sign above one bin said raised right here, so you know what goes into them! Other signs announced the alternates from which those apples had come.

Amanda pointed to a bin full of apples that were almost the same color as the navel oranges across the aisle from them. “What are these?”

“They're weird,” Jeremy said. He was suspicious of unfamiliar food.

Amanda wasn't. “Let's try them.” She picked out two nice ones and dropped them into the bag. Even though petroleum didn't get burned much any more, it still had a million uses. Making every kind of plastic under the sun was one of the most important.