by Ginger Booth
Ava sat bolt upright in bed, heart pounding, nerves jangling, drenched in sweat. Fighting her way out of her sheets, stiff leg muscles complaining at every twitch, nearly gave her a dream flashback. She rolled directly off the loft bed, five feet up, and landed on her feet with a thunk.
Ow. Usually her muscles had the springiness to land well. Not tonight.
Going back to sleep was not an option. Ava peered into Dima’s bunk, but her room-mate was still sound asleep, still hijab-free, strange and crew-cut and creepy in the dark.
Caroming softly off the furniture, Ava stumbled her way out of the room and into the bright-lit hallway, to lean gratefully against a wall. Safe. She leaned her head back and took long sobbing breaths.
She was not naked. She double-checked that point. She wore grey exercise T-shirt and black stretchy workout shorts, their standard bed uniform. She wore one sock, too. The other lost the fight with the sheets.
She stumbled down the hall to the bathroom, just for something to do, and took care of business. She really looked in the mirror for a change. There was no time for that while over 50 recruits jostled through the restrooms. Her face looked puffy instead of bony. No. Was she already gaining weight? She gazed at her face from several angles. She pulled out her T-shirt and examined her breasts. She tried to turn and inspect her butt, but abused muscles arrested that motion. Enough of that. Self-inspection was giving her vertigo.
Soft voices drifted out from the common room, and she followed them in, like a moth drawn to a flame. She sat abruptly in a chair near the door, her legs collapsing in mid-motion. Six other recruits, three of them from the Jersey squad, sat widely spaced around the room. Puño snored from a chair tilted back against the wall.
Sergeant Awalo of the night crew was telling a story. She listened for a few minutes without judgment, as he went into intricate detail of how his mother prepared a traditional African dish. How each spice was ground. Its color and texture. The color and texture and weight of the exact bowl she put the spice into. Frequent digressions gave added detail. The meaning of the spice name. The language used. His own name in the language used. Why his mother chose that name. Ava listened, mouth hanging open.
Ava used to babysit a four-year-old girl in Washington Square Apartments. Her favorite bed-time story was The Sleep Book, by Dr. Seuss, a volume that went on pleasantly, interminably, pointlessly, for a very long time. Ava suspected the girl liked the book because it was so long, and she hated going to sleep. Awalo’s story was like that.
Sergeant Michaelson came in and handed her a glass of warm milk and a painkiller. He sat beside her and smiled gently. “Your first time with us. If you need anything, let me know. Head back to bed whenever you’re ready. You OK for now?”
Ava nodded. Michaelson sat back and relaxed for a few minutes, until he heard another disturbance in the hall. He pressed her shoulder briefly with another smile as he left.
Awalo’s intricate monologue shifted to the fantasy life of his family cat, a tiny feline who believed if only she were stealthy enough, she could bag herself a swan. Ava nodded off in the chair, and jolted back awake when Michaelson steered her back to her bed.
“You don’t need to tuck me in, sergeant,” she grumbled at her door.
He shrugged. “Your first time at night muster. We don’t know that about you yet. Sleep sweet, recruit. If you fall awake again, come back to the commons. Some sleep better there.”
Her poor abused hamstrings hated her for it, but she eventually finished the night sleeping in a hard chair near Puño. His chair was still balanced on two legs when they were kicked out to face morning.
The next day was just as devoid of the exercise that burned off her excess nerves. The next night she was right back in the commons. Michaelson took a turn reading from a very long novel about rabbits.
“Panic. You’re the last,” Calderon quipped, as she limped into the gym on Thursday. “Sorry to do this to you. We can’t put off the MFT any longer. So, baseline stats. First, warm up. Gently.”
He supervised her stretching carefully, to ensure the exercise didn’t set her hamstrings back again. A karate black belt didn’t need supervision on stretching, though.
“How long do I do this?”
“Too warm in that T-shirt yet? Most people lose the shirt.”
In answer, Ava pulled off the ARMY-emblazoned jersey and lobbed it at the wall. A sports bra was the norm for workouts here.
“First, sit-ups. I know you’re tough, Panic, but go gently. Your score will be low. That’s fine.”
“I don’t want a low score.”
“Panic? Up is good. Down is bad. Monday morning when I met you? Since then you trashed your hamstrings and got like 80% worse. You’re studying to become a soldier. Can you be a soldier with trashed hamstrings?”
“No, sergeant. Life sucks with sore hamstrings.”
“Exactly. So now you’ll get a low score. And later you’ll get hundreds of percent better. Unless you strain your hamstrings again. Understood?”
“Yes, sergeant.”
The tests were fairly simple. How many sit-ups she could do in two minutes. Calderon stopped her at one minute and 21 sit-ups, because she was too rough on herself. Repeat with push-ups. Her score on proper Army form push-ups was zero in two minutes. Calderon assured her that was about par for the female recruits at this point. This was followed by a timed two-mile run. Calderon firmly ordered her to walk briskly, and waited at the standard reckoning statue. She could sprint into the finish line if she wanted.
“Not bad,” he said, noting her time while her breath was heaving from the final sprint. “Thirty-four, twenty-three. You walked awful fast for a gimp.”
“So what are the goals?” Ava asked again. He’d refused to answer until the test was over.
“Your goal is always the same. Do a little bit better than you did yesterday. That means like five percent better, not fifty percent, Panic. Minimum standards are still under discussion. Sit-ups probably fifty-five or more in two minutes, either sex.”
“I can do that,” she agreed.
“Yeah, that was the good news. There’s still debate about whether standards should differ between male and female. But as of the moment, you need eighteen minutes on those two miles. About twice as fast. For guys, it’s fifteen and a half minutes.”
“Oh.” Ava could picture herself working up gradually to running the whole two miles.
“And twenty push-ups, for females.” With great reluctance, he added, “And the ruck march. Still heavy debate on the ruck march.”
“What’s that?”
“March nine miles with a fifty pound pack on your back. Three hours.”
Ava didn’t have any real basis for comparison to understand that challenge. “That sounds hard.”
Calderon snorted without humor. “Yeah, it’s a standard the current troops can’t pass. Unless you’re an effing Ranger or Navy SEAL. They’re trying to make it a unisex standard, too. That’s the part I don’t get. They understand the physics on push-ups, why a woman can’t do forty-five in under two minutes. But then they want a hundred-pound woman to to carry the same fifty-pound pack as a one-eighty pound man. That’s the Army for you.”
“But you’ll teach me to do that?”
Calderon looked at her in surprise, then looked away. “Yeah. We’ll work on your upper body strength. Gradually, Panic. No more tearing your muscles. Look, you don’t need to pass any of these standards til the end of Basic. The important thing during fitness camp is to gain weight. To enter Basic, you need to weigh a hundred pounds. How are you eating?”
“I can’t eat all that,” Ava admitted.
Calderon nodded. “Don’t pace yourself by the guys, right? Even the girls are just bigger than you. Eat some of everything, as much variety as you can. Max out on cheese and milk and yogurt, fruit. Potatoes and pasta are good for gaining weight, especially in the evening. You need to gain fat, not just muscle.”
“Fat!” she objected
.
“You’re way too lean, Panic. A healthy woman has some padding. But you want to leave the table comfortable, not too full to work out during the day. Try to eat extra fat and carbohydrates at night. Your goal is to gain two and a half pounds a week. That’s a lot on you. Like me trying to gain five pounds a week.”
“Five weeks to Basic is two pounds a week.”
Calderon shook his head. “Christmas furlough. Solstice, or Yule, or whatever. December 20 to 26, you’ll be back in the Apple.”
Yuck. “Can’t I stay here?” she pleaded.
“Nope. We’re closing the base. I’m on leave. I’ll mesh you a workout plan by this evening. Don’t exceed it, OK? Dismissed.”
14
Interesting fact: Before the Calm, half the population of Iraq was age 21 or younger. Globally, the median age of Muslims was only 23.
By the next day, Ava’s birthday, her high school equivalency prep class was running smoothly. They moved to a medium-sized lecture hall, with small flip-up desk surfaces attached to close-packed seats. Other classes took their turn at the laptop facility.
Elsewhere at fat camp, the management seemed to think they needed at least one sergeant per 25 delinquents. But for this select group, one lady sergeant had no trouble managing well over a hundred.
Everyone felt deflated by their math scores, but Sergeant Weinzapfel wasn’t concerned. They did well on the questions they answered, and ran out of time because they were rusty. That was easy to correct. The first hour of class per day she provided two half hour servings of brief reminder lesson, followed by simple math drill. The thought ways of algebra and geometry returned gently enough.
Social studies was more problematic. Zapple had lesson plans, and presented the material well. But it all unraveled in class discussion. The American government in the old test didn’t exist anymore. To Zapple’s consternation, her students were not sympathetic to the dead country’s ideals and conceits. They didn’t believe the U.S.A. was a democracy in any meaningful sense. They didn’t believe it protected anyone’s rights and freedoms. They thought the balance of powers was a crock. And the whole thing was bought and paid for by billionaires and corporations anyway. Good riddance.
Poor Zapple was an American patriot who actually believed she’d served the cause of freedom during her three tours of active duty in the Middle East. Her students basically believed she’d been suckered, and the Middle East was right to have hated the U.S. for meddling. Zapple tried to present how rich and balanced the previous government had been. Her students argued that the new Hudson Constitution had the virtue of honesty. They lived under a military dictatorship, and were allowed pure democracy inside their villes. No corrupt politicians. Zapple argued that the simplistic Hudson Constitution lacked the all-important checks and balances of the American Constitution. Her students pointed out that those checks and balances let greedy idiots destroy the planet and left their generation holding the bag. Screw the U.S.A. and its grasping materialism. For that matter, screw history. That was all irrelevant now. They had a clean slate, paid for in blood. They should write something new.
Fortunately Zapple didn’t take it personally. She was determined to continue presenting social studies as needed to pass the old test. But she promised that after a week or two of exploration and taking notes, she would advance the student suggestion that the social studies portion of the test be axed for a Hudson diploma. Or re-written to reflect Hudson’s current reality, instead of ‘the fairy tales of a dead empire.’
Zapple looked particularly pained when the recruits called America a dead empire, and its ideals a fairy tale. So of course the terminology stuck like glue. The recruits had a score to settle against the country that set out to ‘cull’ them, and the idiot public who kept destroying the atmosphere for decades after they knew full well what they were doing to the planet. All so that corporations could have slightly wider profit margins – or so they claimed – and the fools thought that meant they’d get paid more for their jobs. While those jobs evaporated and real wages plummeted and rich fat cats laughed all the way to the bank, ever richer and richer. All that, for money that vanished in days when the world economy collapsed.
The fact that most of the students were black or immigrant, or children of immigrants, didn’t help. Until she went to West Point with them, Ava still thought of Long Island as a prosperous suburb. In truth, its population before the epidemic was larger than the whole state of Connecticut, and just as complex, with a number of cities. LI was even more isolated than the Apple Core by the armed epidemic borders. And half the gavis were refugees from the city, anyway. The native Long Islanders blamed the gavis even worse than the city adults blamed the gang rats, for bringing Ebola to them, and dragging multiracial gang culture into their manicured suburban towns.
Yes, morning social studies was great fun for everyone but Zapple. She really must have been a patriot, though, because she sure was dogged about defending American ideals and the Constitution. Ava almost felt sorry for her. Almost. But any attempt to defend America left Ava seeing red with the rest of them. A thousand years of moral perfection couldn’t have excused the money-grubbing idiocy and wars of the twenty-first century, let alone excused the Calm Act, and the ‘culling’ of the past three years.
After the first day, Zapple didn’t assign essays for social studies anymore. She and her grading minions had to read and correct them. The recruits’ composition flaws could be ironed out on topics that didn’t raise the graders’ blood pressure.
Without a timed test to deal with, the class established their own bank of tables down in Washington Hall for lunch. Since they were well-behaved, Zapple took a well-earned break, and no one supervised them.
That was perhaps unwise. No sixties college campus was ever as ardently revolutionary as this gang of clever but despised teen orphans. And they came to lunch fresh from Zapple’s infuriating social studies lessons, with her attempts to defend a government that condemned them and their planet to die.
Afternoon was harder. Zapple passed back their essays from the day before. Ava’s had a big red C- on the front, with red bubbles like measles nit-picking her spelling, punctuation, subject-noun disagreements, infelicitous word choices, and arbitrary paragraph breaks. The grader underlined passages where he took particular offense, and marked them with an exclamation point in the margin.
Then he wrote a counter-essay on the back page vilifying her childish racism. It wasn’t Ava’s idea to write about racism. Sergeant Awalo asked Zapple to make her write about it.
Zapple told them all to revise the essays based on the feedback and hand it in again. Ava’s hand shot into the air. Zapple didn’t let her ask. “I understand, Panic. And I promise to grade your paper personally this time. But you have a paper to revise now.” She raised her voice to reach the rest of the class. “You have forty-five minutes. Then we’ll start fresh with a new essay.” She smiled bracing encouragement.
Ava slumped into her chair and got to it. She only gradually realized that Fox, sitting next to her, was scowling at her paper. “What?” Ava growled at her. “I was assigned this topic as a punishment. For having issues. You ever have issues?”
“Stupid white bitch,” Fox hissed, and bent back to her essay. Fox was the sort to keep her head down and avoid lightening storms. Her long essay from yesterday explained why music was her favorite subject in school Before.
So much for Ava’s hope that she could replace Dima’s friendship with Fox. That was a lost cause anyway. Dima forgave Ava’s white supremacist background. Fox wouldn’t, or at least not enough to get close. But the whole platoon was down to four ‘female men’ by now. The other two were idiots, and also black.
Ava’s punishment paper over with, they were treated to a perky review of where exactly those pesky commas should go, a topic Ava found more abstractly theoretical than physics. And not nearly as interesting.
“Now! For this afternoon’s essay!” Ava marveled at Zapple’s capacity
to project enthusiasm. “I want everyone to write on the same topic today. Why do you want to join the Army? Easy paper, right? Fifteen minutes to break. I want you to use a piece of scratch paper and brainstorm your main points. Outline! Find your strongest statements. Put them in order. Make me believe, yeah! That you – you personally – are exactly the soldier I need for my platoon! We’ll write the essays after the break. So you can even trade notes with your neighbors in outline form. Cool, huh? Go!”
Ava stared at a fresh blank page of notebook paper. The paper stared back. She glanced at Fox’s paper. Fox gave her the shoulder and screened her notebook with her hand. Ava scowled at her.
Yeah, easy question. Why are you here?
Who do you want to be when you grow up? What are your dearest dreams and aspirations? Ava’s brow furrowed deeper. Why would Zapple want me in her platoon?
Ava felt like she was pulling out her own intestines, dredging up ideas to write about, and put them into logical order. She only needed five bullet points for an essay. Three if they were juicy enough. They didn’t even need to be true. She was entranced with that approach for a minute. She could fake it completely, write what some hypothetical ideal recruit might pen as a love song to her own ideal future platoon sergeant. Nah.
Need a job.
Need that job to matter.
Need training.
Good at fighting.
Good at watching out for people, with a flair for leadership.
Guzman asked me to make this work, for other kids to follow me.
Fox was staring at her paper. Ava glowered at her. Fox leaned over and put check marks next to everything but ‘need a job’ and ‘need training.’ “You don’t need squat,” Fox explained. “Talk about what you have to give, not what you want to get. Then you’ve got a good essay.”
