Not that my crush on Tristan i
s
really a crush.
At least
,
it does
n’t feel like one.
But I know how it will
end.
Just like with Torrin.
I will
never say o
ne word to him.
Which i
s probably a go
od thing, given how poorly I’d
conversed with my new friends.
I think
about
Tawni
.
She’ll
be getting out of t
he Pen in six months.
It seems
like a blink of an eye compared to my sentence.
But t
here
’s
so
mething about her story that does
n’t
make sense
to me
.
For one
, she never explained why she wa
s trying to illegal
ly travel interdistrict.
She’
d also said very little about her parents—except that she didn’t thin
k that people should be judged b
y who the
ir parents a
re.
I have a feeling h
er
crime i
s linked to what she’
d said about her parents, like two puzzle pieces that look so different until you fit them together, at whic
h point they look like they’ve
always been joined.
Once she is gone it will
be just
me and Cole.
Which will be fine because I like
Cole.
Although I am
still shocked
by
what he
did
for me earlier, during the riot.
But then Cole will
be gone six months
after
Tawni
.
And I will
be al
one again.
Not that it matters
, bec
ause I will
be leaving the Pen
,
too, he
aded for whatever prison I will
spend the rest of my life in.
I use
the palm of my hand to smack the side
of my head a few times.
I feel
my brain j
ostle back and forth a bit, feel
a dull headache
start to form in my skull.
I
probably kil
led a few brain cells, but it i
s worth it.
A little bi
t of physical pain always seems
to h
elp with the mental pain, helps
me
to
forget about the reality of my lif
e, like a shot of whiskey helps
the miners forget about the monotony of the mines.
It also helps
me focus.
On the puzzles.
For the past six months I’
ve
felt
sorry for myself, and there was
really nothing in my life to take my mind off of my sorrows.
With Cole and
Tawni
’s sudden
entrance into my life, I now have
puzzles to solve.
Clearly they haven
’t told me everything.
I mean, who would?
They’
ve just met me, barely know me.
I certainly have
n’t told them everyth
ing about my past, although I’ve told them a lot more than I
planned to.
Another thing
Tawni
said was
,
“I don’t think he’s a bad guy,” when she
was talking about Tristan.
Her statement i
s a
mystery to me.
I mean, she does
n’t seem like the type to give anyone from the ruling party the benefit of the doubt, especially the President’s eld
est son.
And yet the way she’
d s
aid it, I feel like she
was
confident i
n her statement, like she
added the words
I think
just to make it sound like she was unsure,
when really, behind her words i
s a certain knowledge that
only co
me
s
from firsthand
experience.
Like I said, it i
s a mystery.
One I am
determined to get to the bottom of.
My thoughts a
re interrupted
when an electronic voice blares
through the speaker in my ceiling.
“All guests are in their rooms.
Lights out in exactly five minutes.”
I roll my eyes like I usually do
whe
n I hear
the announcement.
They are a
lways trying to make us feel be
tter about our situation.
It is like just because we a
re juven
iles, the so-called adults ca
n’t be honest with us.
Guests?
Really?
We a
re locked up, our freedoms restricted beyond recognition.
Everyone kno
w
s we a
re inmates, plain and simple.
And
rooms?
Come on.
I look around my “room” as if I am
seeing it for the first time.
No windows.
A thin slat in the door
is
used to let air
in and to speak through.
It’
s a cell.
Sometim
es I
awake from a restless sleep and find the walls closing in on me, threatening to suffocate m
e, crush me.
Sometimes I wish
they would.
I’ve heard they
nam
ed it
the Pen
after the word playpen, like a young child’s little safety enclosure, full of toys and bright-colored bobbles
and trinkets.
But it just makes
me think of the
longer version of the word it i
s
really
short for: penitentiary.
I’m n
ot sure whether they sugarcoat
everything to help us sleep at night, or to help
them
sleep at nigh
t.
Either way, it i
s a waste of time.
I feel tired, but not sleepy.
I am
exhausted from the day’s activities.
Not the lounging around in the yard all day, weighing the pros and cons of giving myself the shock of my life; rather, my
interaction
(if that’s wha
t you call it) with Tristan,
the
conversations with my two new friends
, and my near escape from the riot
.
For some reason I feel like I ca
n’t hold the weight of my body up f
or one more second.
But I ca
n’t sleep
either
, because there is
too much to think about.
Oh yeah,
and I have
to p
ee, too.
Which is difficult when I feel
too drained to even stand up.
The lights go out and I’m
thrust into abject darkness.
I
learned in school about the bi
ological changes that humans have
slowly undergone, generation after generation, since moving underground.
We gained improved night vision due t
o long
exposure to dim or no lighting.
Our s
enses of hearing and smell
have been heightened, making us
less reliant
on our slightly improved sight.
Our skin has become paler and dustier.
Human
lungs
are now
more resistant to the constant intake of rock dust.
Evidently, average life
expectancies are
about twenty
years shorter than when humans lived above
ground, but no one really talks
abo
ut it.
Long story short: we’ve
adapted, for better or worse.
I manag
e
to half-roll off the thin padding on my stone cot and stumbl
e to the corner, where there is
a smal
l hole in the floor.
I squat and manage
to relieve myself before collapsing back into bed.
I try
to take my
mind off of the puzzles that have
been
presented to me.
For one, I know I wo
n’t be able to solve them just by thinking about t
hem.
Not yet, anyway.
I need more facts, need
to ask
Tawni
and Cole some subtle questions.
And listen to them.
Both their words and the true meaning behind
their words.
It’s something my dad taught me.
He’d
say, “You’ll learn far more by
lis
tening tha
n you ever will by
speaking, Adele.
Don’t just focus on the words.
Listen to the tone, to the emotion, to the hidden words—the ones that are unspoken.”
So I think
about something else t
o help me fall asleep.
There i
sn’t much to think about except my past.
I remember when I was a little girl, in Year Three, and the teacher asked each of us what we wanted to be when we grew up.
Most of the boys said miners, like their dads, and most of the girls said mothers.
I said I wanted to be a writer, traveling across the Tri-Realms in search of the inspiration for my next novel.
The kids laughed at me.
Only sun dwellers could be writers
,
they said
.
They were safe laughing at me in the classroom—I think the teacher even smirked a little.
But after class was a different story.
A boy named Garon had laughed the loudest in class.
I knocked him over and bloodied his nose.
He wasn’t laughing anymore.
I read a lot as a kid.
But not the crap written by the sun dweller novelists.
Old books.
Ones that
had been saved by my family
when people started going underground.
They’d been passed down for generations, their covers worn and torn, their pages yellowed and brittle.
Magical books written during another time, when a good imagination was considered valuable.
My favorites were the
Harry Potter
books.
Like me, m
y grandmother had grown up with the witches and wizards of Hogwarts.
We used to talk about Harry Potter together.
How we wished w
e had magic wands
that
we could use to change things, to make life
better for everyone.
Now I feel
even clos
er to Harry tha
n I
did as a kid.
After all, we
both lost our parents.
He lost his to death, and I
lost mine to the government.
In the dark, I bend my legs and flex
them at the knees a few times, trying to ge
t some feeling back.
My eyes a
re
quickly
a
djusting to the dark and I can
just make out the faint outline of
the slot in the door.
I close
my eye
s but sleep continues
to e
vade
me.
As a kid,
I also read books about space travel.
About what it would be like to live
somewhere other than earth
.
Like the moon, for example.
In my books I
saw
pictures of the moon, looking all bright and desolate in the night sky, surroun
ded by twinkling stars and wispy
clouds.
Weird that we’re
called moon dwellers.
We’re still stuck on earth.
Well, not
on
earth so much as
in
it, at least a mile below the deadly surface
.
I’m not sure who the idiot wa
s who decided to c
all us moon dwellers, but I’
d guess he or s
he was a sun dweller.
It seems like most of the dumb ideas co
me from them.
In school they told us tha
t the logic behind the names is
related to how brig
ht each light source
appears
in the sky.
For e
xample, the sun
appears
the brig
htest—at least that’s what we’re told and how it looks
in the pictures
—and therefore
,
those nearest to the surface shoul
d be called sun dwellers.
We are next and a
re like the moon, second brightest.
At the bottom, of cour
se, a
re the star dwellers, miles from the earth’s surfa
ce.
I also heard that there are
some reference
s
to this kind of th
ing in the Bible, too, but I’ve never read it so I’m not sure if it is true.
Bottom line: I think the names a
re stupid.