by Caela Carter
Soon, the shirt is on my body. I’m standing in a tiny room full of mirrors. It’s in a hallway full of other tiny rooms full of mirrors. Charita led me in here, piled the stuff on the bench, and instructed me to put on one of the outfits so we can “see if it fits.”
I have on the yellow shirt and a pair of jeans that only reach right below my knees. Not quite pants and not quite shorts. Charita called them “capris.”
“How’s it going in there?” she shouts over the doorway. The door doesn’t reach the ceiling in this little room. It also doesn’t reach the floor. So she left me alone in here, but I can see her shoes poking out the bottom of the door. I can tell she’s guarding me, keeping me trapped so I won’t run.
I don’t answer.
After a few minutes she says, “Zylynn, honey, want to let me in so I can see if the clothes fit?”
I open the door and she comes in. She reaches for my waist, which makes me jump.
“Sorry, sorry,” she says. “Lift your shirt so I can see the waistline, OK? I won’t touch you ever if you don’t want me to.”
I lift the shirt. All of these rules are coming so fast now, I don’t have time to think about them before I’m following them.
“Hmm,” Charita says. She taps a finger on her chin. “Those look a little baggy on you, don’t they? Why don’t you put on the tan shorts while I go and see if I can find them a size smaller. Would that be OK?”
My eyes go wide. I can hardly believe it. She’s going to leave me.
I nod.
“OK,” she says, “I’ll be right back.”
I listen to her shoes slapping the soles of her feet until she turns out of the hallway of rooms and then she’s gone.
She said to put on a new pair of shorts, but I don’t have to. I don’t have to follow her rules. She’s not the Prophet.
Instead I tiptoe down the hallway myself and out into the bright lights again. I spot Charita, the back of her dark curls as she’s bent over a shelf holding all sorts of jeans. But she can’t see me.
I turn the other way, tiptoe tiptoe tiptoe, until I’m in the middle of a whole new bunch of stuff, stuff we haven’t seen yet, and I’m sure she won’t be able to find me.
It’s my chance. I have to run. I’ll figure out the way home once I get out of here. Father will help me find it. I’ll run and run until I find that shrugging cactus. I’m on my way, Father.
I look around, but I don’t see the door. I have to get through the door, into the parking lot, through all of the cars, and out onto the road.
I stand between two metal racks full of heavy, dark-colored dresses and look right and left, left and right. I can’t find the door. All of the walls feel miles and miles away from these dresses.
There’s a woman with a cart only about five feet away from me. She’s a Liar too because she’s here and she’s a Shopper and she’s not a Child Inside the Light. She’s walking toward me, close, closer, closer.
I can’t let her see me. I can’t let her talk to me.
I dive between two of the dresses on the rack to the left and then I’m in a little dress-cave. They surround me with their colors. It’s too close to dark in here. But it’s the only place I can go. There’s another woman out there now. There are legs all around me.
I take two of the dresses in my hand and peek out. Where is the door? Where is the door?
Please, Father. Help me. Help me get home.
And that’s when I see it. A big sign, close to the ceiling. Exit.
Exit (n.): a way or passage out
Father put a whole sign up there just for me.
I hold my breath until the strangers’ legs are gone, and then I dart out between two of the dresses and I run. I’m wearing the yellow T-shirt and the silly capris. I don’t have shoes on. But I don’t care. This is my chance. I run fast, fast, fast as I can toward Exit.
Sock, sock, sock, sock, sock.
My socks want to slide on the tiled floor but I won’t let them. I lift my feet up too quickly for them to slip. I’m running so fast my feet maybe don’t touch the floor.
I haven’t run this fast since that night. The bad night. The Abomination.
There are Shoppers everywhere but I can’t worry about them. I dart past them. Maybe I run so fast they can’t see me.
And then I see the door. It’s there. In front of me. I can make it. It’s closer than the showers are to the Girls’ Dorm. It’s closer than the Dining Hall is to the Boys’ Dorm. I can make it.
CRASH.
I run right into one of the Shoppers and fall down on my butt. He’s a huge man, bigger than any on the compound, and he’s dressed entirely in blue with little shiny metal things stuck on his shirt.
“Where you going, young lady?” he says.
But I don’t have to answer him. He’s not the Prophet.
I stand and look at him like I’m going to answer. He sticks a fat hip out, leaning to the left. That’s it. I break to the right of him and—whoosh—I’m past him! I’m getting out of here.
But then I freeze. I see someone—a girl—going through the door. It’s—
That girl’s hair is long, but hers would be longer now. It’s spiky and pushed off her head in all sorts of directions. And the girl is not wearing white. She’s wearing a hot-pink shirt. And she’s not with any of the Brothers. She’s with a whole bunch of other girls her age.
But all that could happen in Darkness . . . I think it’s—
Just before she goes through the door, I see her throw her head back like she’s laughing. And I’m sure.
“Jaycia!” I yell.
I take another step, trying to get to her. If I can find her, I can get all the way home. Jaycia knows everything. She’ll know the way.
“Jaycia!” I scream, but she’s almost through the door.
Big hands come down hard on my shoulders and I’m lifted into the air.
“We don’t take too kindly on kids running off in our clothes, little girl,” the Man in Blue says.
The girl who might have been Jaycia disappears through the door.
And I have a Liar touching me. It should burn. It will burn. If he holds me for another second my shoulders will catch on fire.
“Where’s your mother?” he asks.
My mother is God.
Eight
It had been a feast day, so I wasn’t hungry. But the orange was in my right hand anyway. The banana was in my left hand.
“It’s OK, Zylynn,” Thesmerelda said. “Take it.”
It was night. The dorm around me was sleeping. Thesmerelda had come into our dorm and climbed the ladder next to the bed where I slept. She’d woken me with a palm stroking my hair.
It felt weird. I wasn’t used to touching yet. The women had just come back that afternoon.
It was a long time ago. Before Jaycia came. Before I was in charge of the Girls’ Dorm. Before I slept in the top bunks like the oldest girls. I was in a middle bunk.
“But I’m not hungry,” I said.
Thesmerelda smiled. “Good,” she said. Her hair was long past her shoulders, striped with blond and gray. Her skin was so pale all of the lights on the walls reflected off it. “It’s good not to be hungry,” she said. “You take these, OK? You put them under your covers. You keep them here for the next Hungry Day.”
I was getting scared. No one had ever handed just one of us food before. We all got food together.
“It’s all right, Zylynn,” Thesmerelda said, smiling. “I asked Father and he said I could give these to you. He said Mother was very pleased with you. I’m only delivering her prizes.”
Now I smiled. I was good. So good Mother God found a way to deliver me two pieces of fruit.
“Go back to sleep now, OK, child?” Thesmerelda said. “It is right and perfect to sleep through the dark night. Drink some tea.”
I nodded. I drank some tea and put my head on the pillow. Thesmerelda stroked my clumpy hair until I was asleep.
When Brother Zascays came to wake us in the m
orning, I thought maybe it was a dream. But no, I still had the orange and the banana.
And that day was a Hungry Day.
The Man in Blue puts me in a little room and tries to get me to tell him my name. I stand in a corner and shake.
He’s getting ready to punish me. I know it. I’m not sure which of the Shoppers’s rules I broke, but I broke one. Or two. Or more. And punishments in Darkness have to be worse than Inside.
“What’s your name, little girl?” he says again. “I have to get ahold of your mother so that I can let you go.”
I stare at the light in the ceiling. She’s here, I remind myself. She’s everywhere. My mother.
Please help me, Father.
And then Charita is in the doorway. “Zylynn!” she gasps. “I was so worried. I was—don’t do that to me, OK? Don’t run away. Don’t hide. If you need something, we’ll work it out. You don’t have to run.”
I’m still shaking. I’m ready for her to hit me. For Charita and the Man in Blue to put me up against a fence and have the other Shoppers throw rocks at my legs and my back. For something so much worse I can’t imagine it.
Instead she rushes at me and gathers me into her arms again. I let her. A hug is better than a punishment.
“She didn’t know what she was doing, sir. Can’t you see that?” Charita says over my head. Then she pulls back to look at me.
“Where did you go? What were you doing?”
If she realizes I was running away, she’ll never let me out of her sight. I’ll never be able to get out of here. So I say the first thing I can think of.
“I thought I saw Jaycia,” I say.
“Who’s Jaycia?” Charita asks.
“Someone I know. From . . . home . . . before.”
“From the compound?” Charita asks.
I nod.
“Where was she?” Charita asks. “Did you talk to her?”
“Going through the door,” I say. “No.”
“Oh, sweetie,” Charita says. She strokes my head. “I don’t think you saw her. I think you’re so homesick you really, really wanted to see her. And then your brain tricked you into thinking you did. Is that possible?”
I shrug.
Yes, it’s possible. In fact, it couldn’t have been her. The girl I saw going through the door was laughing. That girl was happy. That girl was fine.
And Jaycia is doomed.
I wish they would give me my punishment. It’s too awful to wait and wait and wait for it.
“OK,” the Man in Blue says. “I’ll let you two go.”
“Come on,” Charita says. “Let’s go home. We can try on the rest of everything there.”
I stare at them for a long time before I stand up. I wait for them to trick me. I hold my breath. But the punishment never comes.
These are the things in the cart: the pair of blue jean capris, a pair of white shorts, a pair of gray shorts, a purple shirt that buttons up like my pink one, a gray T-shirt, a white T-shirt, a blue tank top, a red tank top, a pink tank top, two more packages of brightly colored underwear for me and one for Elsie (because she’s running out; I don’t know what that means), two packages of white socks, green flip-flops, brown sunglasses, and the yellow T-shirt that’s the color of the winter sun.
It’s more than Charita first listed but she keeps saying, “It’s OK. You need it.”
I don’t know what I need it for. I don’t know the rules. But the rules say they aren’t going to starve me or beat me for following the girl I thought was Jaycia. And the rules say all of this is mine.
I won’t think about how wobbly that makes me feel.
We stand in a long line of other people and other full carts as the lady behind the counter takes turns beeping each piece of stuff against a machine.
I’m safe for now. Charita doesn’t know I tried to run away. Charita wants to give me softness and colors. So I won’t let the wobbly feeling crawl all the way into me as we stand in this line and it inches closer and closer to the beeping. I’ll save the guilt for later, for at Charita’s house when Father Prophet might be coming to find me and punish me since I didn’t follow his Exit sign.
Toward the front of the line we’re between two more sets of shelves. On our left there’s a tiny refrigerator with a see-through window that’s full of soda bottles standing up like they’re begging you to take them and then rows and rows and rows of brightly colored bags of food. On our right are shelves and shelves of things I’ve never seen before.
The little kid who’s sitting in the cart ahead of us reaches his hand out and pulls a bright green plastic turtle off the shelf. He pulls on its arm and it goes up and down. “Bye-bye, Target,” he says in a silly low voice.
The woman at the front of the cart snatches it out of his hand. “We’re not getting that, Gregory!” she says. “You have plenty to play with at home.”
I watch her put the turtle back on the shelf. Gregory screams and cries and I stare at the plastic turtle.
I’ve only seen a picture of a turtle once on one of the classroom computers. I’ve never seen one for real or in plastic.
“Zylynn?” Charita says. I snap out of it and find her staring at me. “Do you want that?” she asks.
“What is it?” I say.
She laughs. “It’s a toy.”
Toy (n.): an object, often a small representation of something familiar, for children to play with; a plaything
I bite my lips and shake my head.
But she puts it in the cart anyway.
“We live in the evil state of America,” Father Prophet said in Chapel.
We sat on the stone benches. They were hard and cold and uncomfortable but we were trying to listen. If we were uncomfortable, it meant Mother God was not pleased. It was our fault.
Jaycia was sitting next to me. Too close. It was a Mistake to sit too close. I wondered if that’s why the benches felt so cold and hard.
But I didn’t move away. She was doing this thing with her voice, so quiet that only I could hear. It went up and down and up and down in a mmmm sound. Humming.
“You belong to the Light,” Father said.
We all applauded. We kissed the air. That was a joyful sentence.
“Yes, it is a good thing. It is a very good thing. But the hardest part about belonging to the Light is the belonging. You belong to her. Nothing belongs to you.”
We nodded. We heard this all the time.
“We live in a greedy state. The people in Darkness, and you, you who are still addicted to whatever degree, you who are still battling that sneaky demon Curiosity, you think you can have your own. My own bed. My own thought. My own child.”
We nodded like we were supposed to.
“Greed is the beginning of all evil. Without belongings, no country would own bombs for war; no human would own guns with which to destroy other humans; no one would steal or pillage or kidnap. There would be no drugs, no violence, no Darkness. So why do we want our belongings so fiercely? Why do the people of Darkness hold on so tightly to their money, their cars, their . . . what’s the worst thing you can own?”
He made a face like he would throw up.
“Guns,” we said.
Father Prophet smiled a half smile and nodded. “You won’t be like the people of Darkness. You must give up your desire to own. You must strike the word ‘mine’ from your lips. You belong to the Light. You belong to Her.
“And why, why, why do so many humans choose belongings and Darkness over the Light?”
We shifted in our seats. We knew the answer. This was a standard talk, one he’d give once a week or month or something. Jaycia leaned closer to me. It made me wonder if she’d heard it before.
It made me wonder if she had belongings back in the Darkness. If it was hard for her to give belongings up. If she had greed.
But I tried to stop wondering because wondering is bad.
“Greed. Only the Light frees you from greed. All good things come from Light and all bad things come fro
m greed. You have nothing, you own nothing, you are free to be owned by our Mother. And you reach her through me.”
Nine
I’M LYING ON THE BED IN the Pink Stripes Room surrounded by plastic bags with red circles printed on them. When I roll over or move my leg I hear the crinkling of plastic against the fabric inside. The fabrics that are soft and cozy and light and breezy and pink and red and yellow and gray and white. The fabrics Charita said are for me.
It’s a lie. I know it. The food under my bed. The clothes on top of it. The fact that I just thought of this bed as mine.
I can’t have belongings. I have to remember that. It’s getting harder and harder to remember everything.
But I’m talking to Father Prophet. Praying. I’m telling him that I remember always. I remember my Abomination. I remember that he said it was my choice to stay here, that if I really want to, I’ll find a way out. I remember his white clothes and his cropped gray hair and his darting gray eyes. I remember the feasts when the women came home and the pain of Hungry Days and pingings at the fence when we needed to be punished. I remember the mushy oatmeal and how great it tasted the day after a Hungry Day. I remember the buzzing lights and bedtime prayers and all of the rules.
I’m talking to Father Prophet but I’m talking for myself. I’m listing everything I remember from School and Exercise and Chapel, from the kids and the men and the women, from the whitewashed buildings (seven in the first circle, ten or more in the second circle, more more more in the third circle), and the clay paths that spread like spiderwebs in the center of all the circles, and so so so much Light.
Father Prophet made it seem so easy—Remember the Light and you’ll be here when you turn thirteen. Remember the Light and you have nothing to worry about.
But how do I get home when I don’t know the way? Why did that big Liar in the blue clothes have to stop me? If I’d only reached Jaycia, I’d be on the way home now.
Except that wasn’t Jaycia. That girl was smiling and laughing. And Jaycia is doomed. She’s stuck in the Darkness forever. She’s being starved and beaten and punished and burned. Exactly like I will be if I don’t run away.
Because I did the same bad thing Jaycia did.