The War Game

by Black, Crystal

  I needed to not think about this stuff. Memories were nothing but ghosts that haunted you. And there was no way to kill a ghost. You had to learn to ignore them. See through them.

  I closed my book. There were more paper dolls I could make but Ricky had more than enough. “Luann, do you know anything about the cards people talk about? Or the numbers?”

  “I think people try and fill in the gaps of what they don’t know. Don’t pay much attention to them, they’re just fools. But I do know something about numbers—at least, what they mean in my parents’ culture. There are lucky and unlucky numbers. For example, eight is a very lucky number. When people were allowed to fly on the airplanes to my country, the flight numbers would often begin with the number eight. In China, the word eight sounds a lot like the word for wealth.”

  “What’s an unlucky number?”

  “Six. In Cantonese, it sounds like the word meaning to fall down.”

  “Can you teach me the Cantonese words for the numbers?”

  “Not right now, someone might overhear. Here, take this bracelet.” She handed me a wooden beaded bracelet, It had a metal charm with some symbol on it. It looked ancient but it was probably made to look that way, just like my watch. Why do people make things to look old?

  “I can’t take this,” I started.

  “Go. Take it. But make sure it’s not in plain sight. It will bring you luck. We need to attract all the luck we possibly can to get out of here. To Canada.”

  “You’re going to Canada too?”

  “Yes, but only because that’s where there are ships that come from China, bringing shoes and other things. I’m going to go back home on one of those ships.”

  “Like a stowaway? That doesn’t sound safe.”

  She took my hands, and looked at me, “And that is why I need luck.” She took a twig and drew the good luck sign quickly and beautifully in the dirt.

  “It looks like a person offering a jug of wine at an altar. When I was a little girl and my parents were teaching me all of this, I would invent little stories for each one.”

  “What was your story for good luck?”

  “You should make your own story. That way, you’ll remember it better.” She used her shoe to erase the picture.

  I tried thinking of a story to go along with the good luck symbol but I couldn’t think of one. That was on my to-do list for later.

  I started to invent a story of a drunk, forgotten man who stumbles upon an altar but then Dana interrupted my thoughts and dragged me out of there to chat about nothing and everything. He’s one fourth of the Ladies, who aren’t really ladies...or at least not quite yet physically. Except for Sheila because she has all the parts.

  Dana is the youngest of them by a lot. He’s just a handful years older than me. He has short hair but I don’t know what color because he keeps it hidden underneath a hat. I think he’s been trying to grow it out long enough so he’ll look more feminine.

  There was Miriam, who often changed her name to suit her mood, and she was the leader of the pack. My best estimate was that Miriam (who used to be a Michael when she was born and then a Trixie right before I met her) was about forty-five years old. She had great hair. Copper-colored and wavy, like a fifties television mom kind of wavy. Or so I’ve been told by Dana because I have yet to see a television show from the fifties or most decades, for that matter. Miriam was well over six feet tall too but very graceful and quick on her feet and with her hands. Her hands never stopped moving, unless she stopped talking. She had been taking hormones before she was arrested on some bogus charge.

  There was Sue. Sue was Sue. Big hands, big nose, big feet, and big Adam’s apple. Small personality.

  And Sheila. I wouldn’t have known Sheila was born a Juan until Miriam talked about her having had a full operation. Sheila was probably the most gorgeous woman I’ve seen. Latina, quiet, and very girly. I’d ask her to French braid my hair but I had a million knots in it. She could have easily taken anyone’s boyfriend but the Ladies have all agreed to stay away from mine. Well, Sue didn’t say anything. But I didn’t see her hooking up with John anytime in the future.

  They were having fun scheming up ways to get John back for me, not that I implied that I wanted him back or anything. Maybe I did once. Once.

  They were the ones who had most of the makeup in the camp. They loved giving people make-overs but for a price. Although, they said they would give me a free one whenever I wanted. Whenever I felt like getting John’s attention again.

  I rarely saw him, even though the camp here was not that large. Now especially, since the bombing took out most of the marketplace. In my opinion, John should have been the one working hard to get my attention. And I tried not to wonder why he hadn’t yet.

  The Ladies made a good killing with make-overs. There was a rumor that some soldiers were looking for wives and girlfriends. And that this one woman, Julie, was a captive but ended up marrying one of the soldiers and lived in a mansion. Apparently, a lot of women think that can be replicated. Like there was some sort of secret color combination of eye shadow and lipstick that would win a husband. Even if the soldiers at our camp only shopped for a one-time girlfriend deal, that still left the chance of escape.

  Even if that escape was death. None of the women that had left this camp with a soldier ever returned or was heard from again.

  Doesn’t seem to stop others from trying.

  This one soldier had been letting his eyes linger on me every now and then. Talking to me about lunch, of all things. He asked me how the slop was and I told him honestly (I don’t care to spare what feelings he may still have left in him but I probably should have told a lie for practice) but he laughed. Then he started to say that back at the base, they were serving roast beef for lunch. And then he left the conversation hanging there, like he was about to invite me to go back to his base with him.

  Not happening.

  He might have been wearing gray and have red, curly hair like a clown but he certainly wasn’t as aggressive as the other men. Certainly, they all could take whoever they wanted without much resistance but the soldiers-well, they liked to shop.

  They went through the aisle of beds each morning, as if it were a supermarket.

  This section is full of old bags, let’s go to the next aisle, I heard one say once.

  ~~~

  I was watching John and some of the other guys play a game of poker. They used potato chips for the pot. I didn’t realize I was absentmindedly flicking the good luck charm back and forth on my bracelet until Laura walked up and was right in my face with her arms folded over her chest. I’ve noticed her arms are always folded over her chest. She needed a bra. I should get one of the Ladies to find her one, only because I didn’t want John staring at her like that. Not that he would have wanted to, but just in case I needed to cover ground.

  “Cute bracelet. I had one almost exactly like that...when I was five.”

  I knew she was full of it. What girl would happen to have a bracelet with this exact symbol? I just mumbled thanks and hoped she would move along.

  I continued flicking my charm and watched some boys play cards between intervals. One had a stack of cards and a grin on his face, probably winning.

  “You’re just a little girl. Go play with your toys. Make another ugly friendship bracelet.”

  I could not think of much of anything that wasn’t more than four letters long. I even learned a really good four-letter word from the Ladies that begins with the letter C. But they told me not to use it unless I was prepared to fight and have strands of hair pulled out from my head. I didn’t need to start yet another war.

  “I don’t play.”

  “But you do play games. You were playing a game called ‘Go fish.’ Ever heard of it? You’re just an ugly piece of bait, as in jailbait. You’re too young and immature for him. But that doesn’t matter, as you can see, he swam away. Go fish!”

  I almost started laughing until I saw her walk over to them and
sit in John’s lap.

  And he didn’t push her off. He didn’t even see me. Or pretended not to see me. I don’t know which could hurt worse. Couldn’t he see he was just a toy to her?

  ~~~

  “Looks like you need to get your man back.” Dana used part of an old scarf to wipe away my stupid, embarrassing tears. He was wearing red lipstick and a straw hat with a red fabric flower.

  “Don’t worry about her. That girl has no meat on her bones, and we all know how men just love something extra to hold onto.” Miriam dipped her hips to imply what kind of meat men prefer. The other two, Sheila and Sue, remained silent.

  “I’m notI’m not sure what you’re-”

  “Oh, please, honey,” Dana stopped me from dropping some lame excuse. “The whole school knows that you two are an item.”

  We had our own slop table together, the five of us. A soldier escorted a bleach blonde woman out of the camp. She had only been here a few days. Her name was Lilia. When she got here, she had mouse-brown colored hair. Bleach was one of the most expensive (in terms of trading) and hard to find items. Even the Ladies couldn’t get their hands on it. Not that they would have wanted to. The whole purpose of dying your hair blonde was to hook a soldier when they did their shopping. Miriam called the Ladies “defective goods that you can’t even give away for free.”

  I told her that that wasn’t true but she didn’t say anything else.

  Two really old soldiers looked our way and called out, “Hey, good looking! Want to sit on my lap?” Who that was meant for, I was uncertain.

  Miriam enjoyed embarrassing the hell out of some of them.

  She’d bat her lashes, act coy, and say something absolutely obscene but seductively. Only she could get away with it because she was much bigger and more intimidating than most of those guys.

  But today, she ignored them, eating a raw potato.

  Dana saw me watching and warned, “There’s no returns on those purchases, you know.”

  ~~~

  Romance novels were the new currency. Why have George Washington or Abe when you could have shirtless male models? I guessed there must have been an insane, copious amount of them before books were being banned and burned way back when because they were everywhere here.

  There was a flood of them at the marketplace. There was this one man who was trying to record Minnesota’s history. Wrote down all the random facts (made up or not) that people told him in between the text of a Labrador care manual. I didn’t know why he bothered. He knew as well I as I do that most books haven’t been burned, they’re sitting in warehouses. Of course, confining them to one area makes it easier to destroy them all at once.

  And a lot of books had been destroyed but the government still kept most of them. Probably to resell at a ridiculous high price years down the road. Or it was too much of a bother to set them on fire.

  I liked to check in the front of the book to see when a particular edition was printed. The earliest I could find was from the year 2009. That was decades ago. Banning, I heard, happened long before the official declaration of War came about.

  The Ladies let me borrow their paperback novels. They didn’t mind at all since I didn’t need but an hour to find and read all the good parts in them.

  The more amateur the cover, the better it would be, Dana told me. And if it had a hard cover, it was a first edition. I guess the older the books were, the more desired they became.

  I went to use the restroom. The women’s restroom had muddy water (as least, I was able to convince myself that it was mud) and smelled like a crusty tampon. There was quite a commotion at the water-streaked mirror. There was makeup flying, cleavage hiking, trash talking, and butts wiggling into skirts that were obviously meant for someone who probably still has a baby tooth or two left in their mouth.

  I didn’t pay much heed to the spectacle until later, when I connected the dots. I’d seen the Ladies in the women’s restroom every other time I have to go and they’re always applying makeup. So I didn’t think much when the other women of the camp were applying makeup and trying to curl their hair with soda cans. Shopping.

  I also found out about the origin of the “connect the dots” phrase from Miriam. She said that when she was a tot, she would get coloring books with these dots with numbers on them. You draw a line to each dot and it makes a picture. Draw a line to one-two-three. I guess you learned something new everyday.

  Then I had to ask her what a “tot” was. She said it was short for a toddler. And then I asked what a toddler was. And then she rolled her eyes and said I should get my ass back to class.

  I bet if you were to take a map of the all the camps I’ve been to and drew a line to each one in the order I was shuffled to them, you know, I bet it would make a giant skull.

  I pulled out the birds’ nests in my hair with my fingers. Miriam no longer trusted me with her brush because my hair makes it fall apart. The two pieces snapped back together but I am banned from brushing. Miriam said I should care about my appearance more and start to wear makeup regularly because guys like that.

  I caught my tongue when I almost said that if guys really liked makeup and all of that, then they would wear it themselves.

  I could just imagine the stare down I’d get if I had let that one slip out.

  The “men” (as some women refer to the soldiers) hadn’t been “shopping” as much lately. I guess this place had been picked over or maybe a camp close by received a new “shipment.”

  Now that I thought about it, I felt like I’d been talking and thinking a lot in quotation marks. I heard louder whispers about “the game” and the “cards.” But no one really seemed to know what those meant outside of the quotation marks. Or at least they didn’t think a thirteen-year-old girl could handle it. What I did know was this: the cards and the game went together and it wasn’t found in a box with dice. It was something bigger. I think it had a lot to do with Camp Z. But that didn’t explain some people’s paranoia with it.

  For now, I would just jump (or even free fall) to my own conclusions. It was a different camp altogether where people’s brains are hooked up to a machine and are made into characters in a video game. There are no teams, it was all for one and one for none. The more people you killed, the more you won. Until someone pulled the plug, and then everyone died for real.

  Kidding. I didn’t know what to make of it yet but I knew that I needed to pay attention and strain my ears for details because it might pay off in the near future.

  Back to the “shopping” or, rather, the lack of it. The soldier boys haven’t been coming around lately and that made me happy. Yay, another day where I didn’t have to worry about becoming some pervert’s child bride.

  But I guessed all along, they had been putting “items” on “layaway,” as in, they were going to finally pick up what they bought. What they were stealing. And if that wasn’t sick enough, you’d got all these dumb women getting excited about the prospect of it all. To them, it was a lifetime meal ticket. I had known the type of people who would kill someone else here for a stale french fry. Not everyone in these camps was good in nature (some of them regressed to their inner animal), humble, or even plain nice.

  I started to devise a plan in my head to start dressing like a boy so it would alleviate some attention from the soldiers. But then I nixed that when I realized how many of those same soldiers liked to try and hit on Dana and decided that it wasn’t such a great idea after all.

  ~~~

  Just like with every other camp I had been at, eventually the duties of the soldiers and other such government workers, got demoted to us. It started with little tasks with dismal incentives, such as serving lunch for an extra scoop of slop. Confiscating the real good stuff that people barter, like candy bars and expensive jewelry. I had seen people take gold wedding bands from sick inmates (no better word to describe us) and giving it to a soldier in exchange for a kid-sized bag of potato chips.

  Tattling was also huge. The tattler who t
old on the people who plotted to escape got a cookie. And yes, there were plenty of grime balls who were more than willing to sell out their comrades for a ball of flour and sugar.

  Eventually, the tasks got bigger and bigger and soon another one had been recruited for the other team. Team Gray.

  Laura had been digging with a twig to get to the remains of a pink-red lipstick Miriam traded to her weeks back. She improvised and used it as blush, one of the trade secrets the Ladies shared with her.

  I presented my eyewitness accounts and pieced together tidbits of information I found on the matter but none of the Ladies really cared. They said I bitched too much about her. Then Dana said bugs were great for color. Didn’t know if that was true or not, as I didn’t feel quite inclined to try it.

  Laura did this ritual with her twig and lipstick tube right before the slop gets trucked in. Right before this one soldier opened the gate (followed by others with guns) and she was in line with the women.

  She even waved hello to this one soldier who could probably throw a ball (or more likely, a decapitated head) clear cross a football field. What could John offer her anyhow? She probably just figured that one out. A guy who’s been in camps more than half of his life doesn’t have a whole lot going for him, you know?

  A soldier had living space that hasn’t been re-purposed or blown out and re-purposed again. He received some money. I knew it was enough to live on in this defrattled (I don’t think that’s an actual word but it seems to fit) economy and a little extra for entertainment but it was still not that much. Although, the soldiers were very creative in getting the campers to do their work.

  Sometimes I wondered why a soldier wanted to live this kind of measly existence. But then I remembered, they do it for control.

  They treated us like children but they would spank the soul right out of you.

  Sue and Sheila just kind of hung around like flies. Overdressed flies but flies nonetheless. Sheila and I talked more than I talked to Sue and that was saying something because I didn’t understand a single word of what Sheila said. Except for “Hola.”