by Lauren Salem
Despite everything that was strange about this place, my glass room had a great view of the night sky. Last night there was a full moon that shone brightly among the stars. Nestled tightly in our sleeping bags, Johnny and I gazed at the stars, like we used to do on that one night a year when Sonoran Correctional High School would let us go camping. Johnny was an avid camper—me…not so much. Whenever it started to rain, he’d stay outside the tent while I crawled back into it. Sometimes camping was canceled early due to a thunderstorm. When this occurred, Vincent and I loved to watch the teachers drag Johnny back inside. It was hilarious because the teachers literally dragged him. Johnny never left willingly. I always imagined that he’d be some kind of a storm chaser or forest ranger when he grew up. At least when we “camped” in the glass house, he wouldn’t be able to throw bugs on me. Even though I’m a man, I hate bugs; they make me scream like a girl.
The next morning, I woke up and caught Laura changing into her uniform next door. Vincent was a lucky bastard and didn’t even take advantage of it. How could he still be sleeping through all this? I got out of my sleeping bag and unfolded my orange jumpsuit. Mine said “Collins” and “Janitor.” I hoped that didn’t mean what I thought it meant. I didn’t want to miss senior year to be a janitor for some stupidly lame community.
All last year, I missed out on a ton of fun shit. Instead, I had my nose to the grindstone, so I could raise my GPA in time for senior year. My team had a lot of upcoming games scheduled this year that I couldn’t miss. After I was placed at the correctional school by the court, the high school basketball team became my family, and I had never let them down. What would they think if I missed a game? Plus the college recruiters would be there. If I wasn’t there for the college recruiters, I couldn’t get the scholarship I desperately needed, and I would never be able to have a career in professional basketball. I thought I was gonna be sick…
I bolted out the door, ran to the restroom, and threw up in the sink. Two minutes later, I saw Johnny in the mirror, standing behind me.
“Are you OK?” he asked. “What’s going on?”
“I just started thinking about things again,” I said and began to wash my face with cold water to hide the fact that I was crying. “This was the worst possible time of my life for someone to abduct me and take me to some strange psychotic village.”
“Well, there’s never a good time for that,” Johnny laughed.
“Plus, on top of it, my uniform says I’m a janitor, which is completely racist.”
“It seems like I didn’t do much better. Mine says laundry services.”
“Was my ability to clean things the valuable skill that Walnut Cherryville desperately needed? Everyone knows how to clean things, and I’m not even a professional housekeeper.”
“I don’t know what’s going on here, but trust me, we’re going to find out soon.” Johnny eased over to me and whispered, “Don’t worry, I promise we’re going to get out of here.”
I turned off the water and dried my face with a paper towel. “I hope so. If something that’s beyond my control alters my life again for the third time, I will probably murder somebody and succeed this time.”
“Trust me; you don’t want to do that. You’re lucky your grandma didn’t die when you switched her sugar for rat poison. I shot someone, and they actually died. I will never understand what happened that night, and I am always trying to forget what I did. Now let’s stop talking about murdering people and go get breakfast.”
Johnny and I met Vincent and Laura at the cafeteria. I felt like I was in a prison cafeteria, because everyone was walking around in their orange jumpsuits. We each grabbed a tray and waited in line to get our food from the buffet.
“How was everyone’s night?” Johnny asked.
“Awful,” Laura complained. “Can’t wait to sleep in a normal bed again. Sleeping on the floor makes my hips hurt.”
“I slept on the street once,” Vincent added. “Compared to that, sleeping on glass is quite comfortable.”
“You’re weird.”
“Did you catch that view of the moon last night?” Johnny asked. “Wasn’t that amazing? It was the best—”
“Hold it,” I interrupted. “Let’s not get distracted from our mission here.”
“What’s our mission?” Vincent asked.
I stacked fried eggs, hash browns, bacon, sausage, and pancakes onto my plate. Now this was what I was talking about: a hearty and delicious breakfast. When I reached the end of the line, I grabbed a carton of orange juice.
“Wow, looks like you’re feeding an army. You must be really hungry,” Veronica said.
I turned and saw Veronica replacing the almost-empty tray of pancakes with a fresh batch. “Good morning,” I replied.
“Are you sure eating that much is not going to make you tired?” she asked. “Today is your first day of work.”
I didn’t really care about work. How hard is it to be a janitor, anyway?
“I’m really hungry from not eating much yesterday. See you around,” I said before leaving to find my group an empty table. I claimed our table, sat down, and folded over the edge of my napkin into my uniform collar. I poured maple syrup all over everything on the plate. With a fork in the left hand and a knife in my right, I was ready to indulge in a giant feast of fatty foods. Right before I took my first bite, Vincent had to interrupt.
“So you were saying something about a mission?”
Laura sat down, but Johnny was caught in the buffet line, talking to Veronica.
“Well, don’t you want to get out of here and go home?” I asked.
“I want to get out of here and go to Las Vegas,” Laura said.
Vincent shrugged and never verbally responded to my question.
“At least the food is decent,” Laura commented.
All she had on her plate was yogurt and fruit. That’s not breakfast; that’s torture.
“Looks like you’re on a diet, Laura.”
“Looks like you’re going to have a heart attack, Collins.”
Johnny sat down at the table after finishing what appeared like a long conversation with Veronica.
“What were you guys talking about?” I asked.
“Nothing really,” Johnny replied.
When I finished eating, I stood up from the table and rubbed my belly. “What a load.”
“You’re disgusting,” Laura commented.
You’re a hot, annoying bitch I wanted to say, but somehow managed to keep my mouth shut. The more I got to know her, the less I wanted to sleep with her. I was glad she was Vincent’s problem and not mine. I started walking away from the table when Johnny called my name.
“Collins, you didn’t take your tray.”
I stopped and turned to Johnny. I didn’t take it because I decided to leave it there.
“Don’t make Veronica’s job harder than it already is; now come take your tray,” he added.
I didn’t care how hard Veronica’s job was, all I cared about was getting home! I grabbed the napkin from my collar, tossed it on the floor, and walked away. I waited by the key scanner like Kenneth said a few minutes before nine. I got there first, and eventually Johnny, Vincent, and Laura came to wait with me.
“Collins,” an old East Indian man appeared and called out, “come with me.”
The walk to the janitor’s closet was slow and tragic. The man held a mop in his right hand and used it as a walker. It took five minutes to walk down half a hallway with him. When we reached the janitor’s closet, he attempted to scan his key, but the barcode reader couldn’t read it because his arm trembled terribly.
After ten minutes, this made me frustrated enough to take the key from him and scan it myself. The man shot me a funny look…I think, but it was hard to tell behind all the wrinkly flaps of skin on his face.
“Sorry,” I said, while handing his keys back to him.
Behind the door was a giant closet filled with gallon-sized bottles
of cleaning solutions stacked on every shelf in a variety of colors. Every bottle was written on with permanent marker: blue “toilets/showers,” pink “floors,” green “sinks/counter tops,” and yellow “windows/mirrors.”
“This room is just for cleaning solutions,” he said. “I don’t want to find anything else in this closet. Every day you will take the amount of solution you need in a smaller container or spray bottle and leave the gallon bottle in here.”
He began to unlock the next closet door, and I decided to just wait for him this time. He pulled out a pushcart from the closet. “Here is your state-of-the-art janitor’s pushcart where you will keep all your equipment during the day. When your shift is over, you will return your cart to this closet. If you need any extra supplies, like a new duster, paper towels, or any supplies besides cleaning solutions, you get those from this closet. With this newfangled contraption they gave us, you can fit or attach all the equipment you need to your cart. This cart has everything you need on it to start cleaning, so enjoy. Oh, and here is your cleaning schedule. You will repeat this schedule every week. Your scan key has been authorized to enter and clean only the rooms on your schedule during the allotted time. If I were you, I’d start by cleaning the public rooms first, since the governor lets you spend only two hours in each public room at a time. You can take as long as you want in the bathrooms, so I’d do those last.”
I glanced at the schedule. “I don’t know where any of these rooms are.”
“You’re young and strappy; you’ll figure it out,” he said as he began to slowly walk away.
First on the schedule: the game room. Time for a little fun! I wondered if this pimped-out cleaning cart could double as a scooter. I got a running head start, and when the cart rolled down the hall fast enough, I hopped on the edge. Might as well have a little fun in hell if we were gonna be here for a while. “Watch out,” I yelled out to pedestrians.
They screamed, dropped what they were holding, and ran out of the way.
I even passed my supervisor, and he had a head start!
“Somebody stop that man!”
“No one can stop me,” I yelled. “I’m cart-o-roller!”
Yeah, no one can stop me except the wall…oh shit. My eyes widened right before the crash. I slammed against the wall, causing bottles of cleaning solution to explode and fly everywhere. When I hopped off, I was circled by guards and an audience that stood at a distance.
“Stop right there,” they said with their guns pointed at me.
I raised my hands over my head to surrender.
“Put your hands on the wall!”
Really? You guys are more or less mall cops, pretending to be the real thing. I put my hands on the wall and looked over at the cart that I destroyed. The vacuum was completely smashed, and, besides the bottles, everything else looked like it survived. One of the guards pulled out a digital camera and started taking pictures of the accident. What was this—a crime scene now? Another guard pulled out a notepad and started writing something. I rolled my eyes and chuckled at them.
“Quiet!”
I stopped.
“Hands behind your back,” a guard ordered.
They tightened handcuffs around my wrists and told me to start walking.
“It’s time to be judged for your crimes.”
They walked me to a place that wasn’t shown to me on Kenneth’s tour, the courtroom. As we walked out of the glass building into the sandy village, the citizens gazed at me with their blank faces. Being pushed around in handcuffs by the guards was like a train wreck; everyone had to look. After walking across the village, we stopped in front of a small, dome-shaped building made out of red clay. The clay had pictures of stick people carved into it, but I didn’t get a chance to observe them. The guards quickly scanned their key and pushed me into the dome, which looked smaller on the outside than it did on the inside. I was confused. Where did all the clay go? I wanted to reach out and touch the walls to confirm that the clay had disappeared, but I couldn’t because the guards trapped me in their circle.
The windowless walls now looked white and narrow but reached far into the sky. Together, they formed a perfect square that was connected by a dome-shaped skylight, a giant glass window serving as a roof. The guards took a number, they walked me down the red carpet, and we sat down on a bench. The sun beamed through the skylight on to a beautiful African queen with purple lips and long, braided hair, wearing a black silk robe. A frail white man stood before her, surrounded by guards.
“Approach the bench,” she said. “State your name.”
The guards brought the man forward, and the man said his name was Ben White. Another woman, who I assume was her assistant, brought her Ben White’s file from another room behind the desk where the African queen sat. When the assistant brought the file to the queen, she took a two-second glance at it.
“What are his crimes?”
“Stealing shower coins, Your Honor,” a guard said. “May I approach the bench with my evidence?”
“Proceed.”
The guard handed over his camera and notepad to the judge. I could hear the camera click as she flipped through the pictures. She connected the camera to her computer and printed the pictures.
“This man is guilty as charged.” She wrote something in Ben’s folder before she added the pictures and the guard’s notes to his file. “This is his second offense, so his case will proceed to Chair Trials.”
“No, Your Honor, please,” Ben cried, falling to his knees.
“Take him away,” she ordered.
“I’ll never do it again, I promise,” Ben continued, as the guards dragged him out of the courtroom.
“Number 232,” she called.
The guards walked me up to the yellow line where the red carpet ended.
“Approach the bench, and state your name.”
The guards walked me up to the bench. “Collins Greene.”
The queen’s assistant brought the queen my file. As she began to look through it, my funny bone stopped tingling, and I became slightly nervous. I felt that everything I learned about this place was ridiculous and funny until now. What did my file say about me? Why was that man freaking out so much that his case was going to Chair Trials? What the hell was Chair Trials? It could be anything…The people here were freaking nuts!
“What are his crimes?”
“Vandalism of Walnut Cherryville property, public disturbance, and being absent from work.”
“I wasn’t absent from work,” I refuted.
“Your Honor, may I show you my evidence?”
“Proceed. And for the record, Collins, you will not speak unless spoken to.”
One guard handed over both the notes and the camera. She flipped through the pictures, printed them, and placed the evidence in my file along with her notes.
“This man is guilty as charged on all counts. Since you are very new to our village and a first-time offender, I will let you off with a warning. If I ever see you in my courtroom again, you will receive a serious punishment. Do you understand?”
“No,” I responded. “I’m very confused, and I’m not familiar with any of your laws.”
The queen pulled out a sheet of paper and handed it to me. “This is a list and explanation of all Walnut Cherryville’s current laws. Please keep this as a reference. Usually, the governor will notify the village if there are any changes to the laws.”
“OK,” I said.
“Have a nice day, Collins, and be a good citizen, all right?” she said.
I nodded as the guards escorted me out the courtroom and unlocked my handcuffs. They dropped me in the sand and began to walk away.
“Wait,” I yelled out.
They stopped in their tracks and turned toward me.
“The dome…why is it bigger on the inside?”
The guards glanced at each other before deciding to kick sand in my face. They walked away without answering my question…bastards. I stood
up from the sand, wiped my face on my sleeve, and scanned my key. Access Denied…damn. I strolled around the dome, observing the stick-man pictures as I ran my hand against them. It looked like the pictures were supposed to tell a story, but I didn’t know what they meant.
