by Ginger Booth
Still stifling a laugh, Ava nodded her head in big swooping nods. “Big. Tough.”
“OK, big guy. Let’s try a sleeping pill and put you back to bed.”
The giggles vanished. “No.” She swallowed. “Not going in there.” Her voice was strident enough to cause the other sleepy recruits to look up, including Puño, the common room’s most faithful night dweller.
“Office,” Awalo said. She perforce followed him in for a private talk. They settled into hard chairs side by side, the same configuration they just left in the common room. They didn’t bother with a light. The door had a frosted glass window, and the hall was lit.
Awalo leaned forearms on knees and studied his hands. “Panic, I don’t think you’re afraid of much. What’s going on?”
“Don’t want to hurt you.”
Now it Awalo’s turn to snicker into his hand. “You and which twenty from your squad, Panic.”
Ava chuckled, too. “I meant your feelings.”
Awalo laughed some more. “Yeah, us sergeants got very tender feelings. Hoo-ah.” Throughout, he steadfastly kept his gaze on his hands to give her emotional space.
“It’s because he’s black,” Ava admitted in a whisper.
Awalo’s mirth dissipated into the gloom. “OK.”
“It’s OK during the day. I mean, I don’t really think a guy’s going to rape me, just because he’s black. I don’t.”
“OK.”
“But it was the first time. You don’t want to hear this.”
“I don’t need to hear it. None of my business. But I think you need to say it.”
“Did you guys change the rules again?” Ava complained. “I thought we don’t talk about night terrors at night. You tell endless stories. Michaelson reads the bunny book.”
“Got new guidance, from the LI quarantines. Said you need to talk about crap when it comes up. Never wait, never dredge stuff up. Because most of the time, traumatic memories aren’t accessible. Like, you’ve got them stowed away, so you can cope. That sound right?”
“Yeah.”
“It came up. So just say it. Like you’re dumping it on the desk.”
“A dozen black guys jumped my boyfriend and me. Raped us both. Cut on us. Watched –” She stopped. There. That was as cut and dried as she could make it. She swallowed. “We formed the gang after that. White only. All the gangs, you know, are one race or another. Poor Sauce, Filipino, never found anyone who’d accept him. I told myself it was that. Why we were a white supremacist gang. All the gangs stuck to their own kind. And maybe for Frosty, my boyfriend, he was racist even before that, I think. Anti-immigrant. For me it was that night.”
Awalo gave her a few more seconds to see if she’d add anything, but she was done. “OK. Is it dumped on the desk?”
“What?”
“Is that all you need to dump on Clarke’s desk right now? I mean, that’s not all that was in the original event.”
“No, I don’t want to talk about that.”
“OK. Yes, Panic, I’m offended. I’m a black guy and I’ve never raped anybody and never would. I grew up in a nice town in South Jersey, good family, good grades, dressed nice. And I’d cross the street and hear people lock their car doors. Yeah, racism pisses me off. You get that.”
“I get that,” Ava agreed in a tiny voice.
“Your views are an insult to me, and to every guy in the platoon.”
Ava gulped. “Yes, sergeant.”
“We’ve all got some broken furniture in the attic, and bad memories. Yours are real bad. I’m not trying to minimize that. And I definitely agree with what they said, that you don’t dredge this crap up. You leave it lie if you can.
“When it comes up, though, you can face it. Say it to someone safe. Write it on a piece of paper, crumple it up and throw it away. Just face it. And then choose. Do you choose to be afraid of black men? Because I gotta tell you, Panic, you can have that fear, or the Army. Not both. You serve in the Army, you serve with black men. Period. We all serve under General Houston. He’s black as I am. Black as Calderon. Black as half your platoon.”
“Understood.”
“And we’ve got your back. We protect you, and you protect us. I think I can count on you that way, right? You’d protect me. And your black room-mate, who’s that, Long?”
“Yeah. I would.”
“So it’s just moldy crap in the back of the fridge. You look at it, don’t dare open the plastic wrap, and toss it out.”
She snickered. “Been a long time since I had a fridge.”
“True. But you know what I mean. Do you really want to peel back that plastic wrap?”
“No. That’s definitely mold. I can see it through the wrapper.”
“That’s what I’m talking about. Ready for a sleeping pill?”
“Maybe I’d rather keep control and stay awake all night.” She started to rock in her chair.
“Yeah? When are you going to trust your squad? Tomorrow? Next week?”
“I –” Her foot started tapping. Her arms hugged her chest. She erupted onto her feet. “Dammit, I trust them now. The nut cases are gone. But not to sleep. I wish we were all in one big barracks room. Then I’d be fine.”
“But you’re not. So you have to deal with how it is. And tomorrow night, Panic, we’re swapping rooms again. Two guys plus you.”
“Can I keep the door open to the hall?”
“If your room-mates agree. Too much light. Tell you what, you can leave the door open tonight, but only if you take the sleeping pill.”
“Alright,” she whispered. She accepted the pill and downed it. “We didn’t trust the pills back in the ville. People died from them.”
Awalo had heard that about a hundred times from the platoon’s fifty-odd recruits. He sighed. “The Army meds are safe,” he intoned in his night-story voice. He led her out the door, and stopped at the common room. “You can do it from here on your own, right?”
“Right. No. Not yet.”
“Then come into the common room. Got some notebooks and pens if you want to write something down to throw away. Good practice for tomorrow.”
Her forehead crumpled. “What happens tomorrow?”
“You’ll see.”
As drug-induced sleepiness gathered her in, she sat and wrote a letter of what she’d never, ever say to Frosty.
When I remember what they did to me that night, it’s like it’s walled off behind glass. But what they did to you, that I couldn’t stop them, couldn’t help you, then I want to cry, and I’m like a raging forest fire. Maybe I do wish I were 10 foot tall, and I could kill anyone who hurt you. But I’m little and it makes me furious. Stupid, huh.
She wiped eyes brimming with tears, but not flowing over. She ripped the page out, crumpled it in a ball, and realized there was no trash can in the room. Trash wasn’t common anymore. She had to think about it. Yes, there was a trash can in the latrines. She threw out the crumpled note sheet there, and went to bed.
She forgot all about leaving the door open. She was asleep minutes after she clambered into the loft. The drug kept her that way to reveille.
17
Interesting fact: Emmett MacLaren’s partner Dee Baker was co-author of the Project Reunion plan to save New York City. She spearheaded the public relations mission to rally civilian support outside the Apple Zone.
After three weeks, morning fitness was routine. By now the recruits knew how to perform the myriad exercises properly. They tracked their own progression on their phones, their current baseline and when and how to step up the intensity.
This was no small feat. They alternated days between strength training and running training circuits, morning and afternoon, and each regimen involved nearly 30 different exercises, with wildly differing numbers of repetitions. They repeated the training circuit, with judicious breaks for rest and hydration, until two hours was up, twice a day. Four other platoons shared the same gym, the whole company, for around 250 bodies each working their own indi
vidualized version of a single master program.
Sergeants Calderon and Singh moved through them, making suggestions here and there. Sergeant Michaelson was here today on morning shift as well, to the recruits’ surprise.
Most of the females, and some of the males, built their upper body strength with high repetitions on small dumbbells, not being strong enough yet for push-ups and pull-ups. If they could barely do a single chin-up, attacking the problem head-on was pointless. They needed to work their way up to it.
Ava proudly graduated to the bars that morning. She leapt up to the bars for her first straight-arm pulls, and promptly got chewed out by Calderon. He kicked a step to her, and made her promise to use it instead of jerking her shoulders out of their sockets to reach the bars.
“Respect, Panic. Slow and steady, and respect the body. Remember your hamstrings. You keep making the same mistake. Do climbing drill 1 once today, then back to free weights.”
“Aw!” Ava thought she’d graduated from free weights. Climbing drill 1 was a set of five exercises. She’d intended to start all eighteen exercises in the four climbing drills today.
“You’ll get there. How many circuits you up to now?”
“Four and a bit.”
He nodded. “So day after tomorrow you do climbing drill 1 for two circuits, next time three. Before you’re doing five circuits, you start adding climbing drill 2. Jerking your shoulders won’t speed things up. Respect.”
“Yes, sergeant.” Ava felt like an idiot doing only two pulls at dead slow for each of five movements. Then her big debut on the bars was over until late afternoon.
But she had to concede, the instructors knew their stuff. She thought she was in good shape before she got to West Point. And compared to most, she was a dynamo. But with effectively unlimited good food, and four hours a day of systematic exercise under the exacting eyes of skilled fitness trainers, her progress was amazing.
She was just impatient. She also wasn’t adding enough fat for the instructors’ tastes. She ate, but these workouts really burned through the calories.
When Calderon blew the whistle to gather for the group cool-down exercises at a quarter past nine, she was nicely tired. In truth, right after training was the best she felt all day, with strength in reserve and a smooth endorphin high. After a good workout was about the only time she ever fully unwound. During the Starve, with real enemies to watch out for, she wasn’t this tense and high-strung. Of course, while starving she never had the energy for it.
The drill sergeants, ardent fitness nuts themselves, knew full well that right after workout was the best time to broach difficult subjects.
“Listen up,” Calderon announced to his squad of 25. “We’re changing things up today. Stop groaning. Resilience. Readiness. The only constant in life is change. New room assignments.”
Ava would keep her bed, but the bunk beds would go to Marquis and Fang. It could be worse. She knew both well, and they weren’t interested in her. She was more concerned about Dima, who would room with Fakhir and Long.
“Next,” Calderon continued, “we’re cutting back on night coverage. Sergeant Michaelson will be on duty oh-four hundred to fourteen hundred hours, Sergeant Awalo twelve noon to twenty hundred. Between twenty hundred and oh-four hundred, we will sleep, pretty pumpkins. Night guards will patrol. You stay in your rooms after lights-out, except to use the latrines.”
Ava caught Puño’s eye. They shared a sigh of resignation. They knew the comforting night nursery could never last to Basic. It was a crutch they’d have to outgrow.
“Next. Starting today, no more free time from morning announcements – that’s now – until afternoon circuit training. This morning, Puño, Marquis, report to the kitchens. Panic, Sauce, you’re Washington Hall room 310. The rest of you, with me in Washington Hall 235. Get dressed and get moving.”
En route, curiouser and curiouser, Ava and Sauce were joined by Fox from the Jersey squad in their quest for Washington Hall room 310. This proved to be in one of the other six wings of the building from room 235. It wasn’t a seminar-size classroom like most, but a large executive-style lecture hall. Rising tiers of seats included generous desk space and laptop computers.
Ava did a double-take as she realized over half of the students in the hall were the often beefier Long Island recruits. And downright plump, a couple of weight-loss candidates were in the room, too. Trained in a single separate platoon from the underfed majority, and housed in the LI barracks, this was the first time Ava was ever assigned an activity with the overweight suburbanites. Rural, she corrected herself. Few in Hudson were overweight anymore, unless they lived on a farm.
A friendly-looking blond female sergeant waved them in, and pointed out that the seats had name cards. The three from her platoon wouldn’t sit together. Ava climbed to a laptop-supplied desk surrounded by people she didn’t know. Though she recognized a couple LI recruits seated below her. They ran the new student meshnet. The word was they worked as interns for the meshnet software development team out on LI. Ava couldn’t imagine why they’d give up such a plum job to join the Army.
“I think that’s everybody. Welcome! I’m Sergeant Alyssa Weinzapfel. You can call me Sergeant Zapple. Everybody does. In case you were wondering, you’re here to take a practice high school equivalency exam.”
The room erupted in cheers.
“Yup, settle down. By those cheers, I can tell your platoon sergeants chose you well. You’re motivated to get high school diplomas. And you may have a realistic near-term shot at it. Most of your class-mates also want that diploma. But they’re not as close to the finish line. If you’re in this room, you were strong in math and science. Maybe not so hot at writing and social studies.”
A general chuckle spread through the room.
“You’ll take today’s test on these laptops. These are timed tests, with scheduled breaks. The practice test takes three and a half hours. Just FYI, this is a half-length test. The real GED takes seven hours. We’ll eat lunch up here so you don’t miss afternoon circuit training. Work steadily. Don’t get frustrated by how rusty you are. This is a diagnostic test, to see what you need to practice. Let’s begin.”
As she plowed through the test, Ava needed to take time to reason out forgotten bits of algebra and geometry that she once could have flown through. She hoped her skills were merely rusty, not gone. But in two years of gang politics, starvation, street fights and copper pipe salvage, the quadratic equation hadn’t come up once, nor isosceles triangles. She envied the meshnet interns. At least if they’d been programming, they’d played with a variable lately.
Science was a breeze, and reading comprehension. Writing and English grammar probably weren’t much worse for her than before the epidemic. She wasn’t raised by fluent English speakers. Her classmates in high school weren’t too fluent, either, truth be told. Most of them chattered in Cantonese out of class.
A few recruits were allowed a foreign language dictionary app on a phone, as well as a calculator, though they had to take the test in English. That wouldn’t help Ava. She wasn’t any better in Serbian, just weak in English. Fortunately she read a lot. Deda always said that would compensate for bad English at home.
The brought-in sandwich lunch was fun. She got to socialize outside her home table, and commiserate over forgotten basic algebra. This was far better than being in high school. She had a whole lifestyle in common with her fellow students here, and none of them gibbered in Cantonese. For the first time in two years, she didn’t lie to other gang folk about being good at school.
“I’m surprised Marquis and Puño aren’t here,” she said to Sauce when he drifted by her, among the clutch of students wringing the meshnet interns for insider information.
“Already in college, Panic,” Sauce explained. “Puño was a freshman at NYU. Marquis was a sophomore at City College. Don’t you turn eighteen this month?”
Oops. It suddenly dawned on her that many recruits in the room were simply older than
she was. She had two and a half years left to go on high school. “Yeah. You’re nineteen?”
Sauce laughed. “Twenty. It’s OK, smart stuff, I’ll keep your secret.” He winked and turned his attention elsewhere. The LI coders were explaining yet again that the Apple meshnet was originally developed in Midtown. Last Thanksgiving, Dee Baker stole away the coders to Camp Suffolk, to work for her and Colonel Cameron while they went through quarantine.
Ava felt a little deflated at that. She ought to keep hiding how smart she was after all. But Fox – looking merely anorexic these days, instead of the famine victim from Ethiopia she appeared the first day – snuck up from behind and bopped shoulders with her.
“Psst,” she whispered in Ava’s ear. “I hear you’re only eighteen, too. High fives, sistah!” They slapped hands. “We’re small but mighty. Junior?”
Ava shook her head and whispered, “Sophomore. Hey, you skip a grade?”
“Don’t tell on me now,” Fox whispered back with a grin. “Ain’t no girl too smart to play dumb.”
“For sure. Hope I do well enough on the test to stay in this group,” Ava murmured back in concern.
Fox shrugged. “Pays the same. You know?”
“Yeah. Just enjoying this.”
“Mm-hm!”
After lunch, Ava felt the test went even better. Test-taking itself was a skill that got rusty. It felt good coming back to her.
Afterwards, at afternoon workout, for once Ava approached her new climbing 1 exercises scientifically. She omitted the self-criticism, and instead figured out the best position to place her eight inch exercise step. She considered what went right and wrong in the morning’s two reps apiece of the exercise sequence. She reviewed the diagrams and hints before doing each lift. And she didn’t rush the timing at all. Slow meant slow for the unfamiliar ‘heel hooks’ and ‘leg tucks.’
Calderon was sure to catch her doing it right. “Way to go, Panic!”
