by Martha Adele
I have to wonder if I would have stabbed Zigzag with the vial, if he would have reacted like I did—like I am. I’m glad I didn’t, though. Honestly, I like the relief. I like the relief I feel when the medicine kicks in. It is the only sort of calm I feel. It has been the only sort of calm I have felt since Dad died.
Since Dad …
The door handle back to the orange room is cold. Cold and metal, just like it was forty minutes ago when I left the room. Just like it was before I was attacked. Just like it was before I blacked out.
The first thing I notice when I enter the room is Janice, Mavis, and Logan all being given the buckets of bugels to stack in the harvest bin in the corner of the room. All of the kids are bringing over their full buckets of fruit one by one. Mavis and Logan look to be having a fun time stacking and talking with Janice. Henry stands by the bin with a clipboard and a pen, writing down numbers that are meaningless to me.
“Sam!” Janice calls out joyfully, turning the heads of Logan, Mavis, and Henry, who all shoot me a welcoming smile.
I nod to her and try to return the smile. Janice immediately takes off her gloves and heads over my direction. “Hey, are you okay?” Logan and Mavis quickly follow, leaving the kids to talk among themselves.
Shocked at how quickly Janice jumps to the conclusion that something is wrong, I take a step back. “What? I’m fine. Why?”
Janice’s face changes from an expression of concern to one of disbelief. “Because you were gone a lot longer than you should have been.”
Mavis looks to me for an answer. “Sam, what’s wrong?”
I shake my head and glance down at my feet, avoiding all eye contact I can. “Nothing’s wrong.”
“Are you sure?” Logan asks me.
“Yes,” I spit back. “I’m fine.”
Mavis and Logan continue to look at me. I can tell they are worried and want to keep asking, but they can tell that their curiosity is really irritating me.
Janice turns back to Mavis and Logan. She clears her throat and waves them off. “Kids, go ahead and go help plant the rollburries. I will be there in a minute.” Mavis and Logan nod in compliance and make their way back over to the harvest bin with Henry.
Janice swiftly turns back around to me. She lowers her head, still keeping her gaze on my eyes. “Honey, I would have believed you if you wouldn’t have reacted so defensively. I would have believed that you got lost or something,” I lower my head to try to avoid further eye contact, but she crosses her arms and continues anyways, “But now I know something is wrong.”
“I’m fine,” I try to answer normally.
“Honey.” Janice takes my hand and looks at my eyes—not in my eyes, but at. “Your eyes. The whites have a slight pink tone.” She changes her gaze from the whites of my eyes back to my pupils. “Have you taken some medicine?”
I pull my hand away from her slowly. Janice is one of the only people in this mountain that I trust, but is it really any of her business?
“Sam?” She looks me in the eyes and holds my gaze. She stares at me for moments upon moments, waiting for me to explain.
“What …” I look over to Mavis and Logan, who glance from their spots by the planters back to me. I shake off their attention and turn back to Janice. “What’s a ‘retty’?”
Janice’s eyes grow. “What? Where did you hear that?”
I look away from her back to my feet.
“Did someone call you that?” She pauses, waiting for my answer. When I don’t speak, she steps closer to me and whispers, “Sam?”
I shrug, not wanting to answer. “What does it mean?”
She takes a deep breath and folds her hands in front of her. “‘Retty’ is an awful term that bullies have begun to use to describe people with mental disabilities. Even the slightest issues.” I glance back up to her to see her shaking her head and clenching her jaw. Her hair, up in a ponytail, has begun to come so loose that the layers in her hair are falling out every which way. “Sam, did someone call you that? Do you know who it was?”
I shake my head and look back down.
“I can go and check the security cameras in the—”
“No!” I shout. Everyone in the room turns back to look at me due to my accidental scream. “I mean no. Please. It’s fine.” If Janice were to see the video, she would see the whole thing that happened. She would see me getting beat up. She would see me being sat on, being forced against the wall, being abused with my own medicine. “It’s fine.”
“Are you sure? We have no tolerance for bullying in Bergland. Anyone who messed with you can and will have serious punishments if I find out the names.”
“No. Please, Janice.” I learned from a very, very early age that snitches get stitches. “Please. I’m okay.”
Janice sighs. She narrows her eyes at me and shakes her head. “Fine. Just this time, though, and only because you asked. If you ever have any trouble—and I mean any trouble—with anything at all, please know you can come talk to me.”
I nod. “Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”
She smiles and hands me a bag of seeds from the seed bin beside her. Janice sends me off to go plant with Mavis and Logan while she and Henry keep counting the bugels.
I notice when I approach Mavis and Logan as they make the mounds side by side that Mavis has already made her mound of dirt and planted her seeds. She is just standing by Logan and watching him. Logan’s mound is a perfect square with rounded-off edges. Inside of the mound, he has drawn out a perfect circle, where the rollburry stand will go; and he is laying out the seeds one by one from what seems like a perfect distance apart from one another.
Sure, watching him achieve his obsessive idea of perfection can be calming, but it also makes me wonder. What if what the guys said in the hallway is true? What if we really are undesirable? Just for having mental quirks that others don’t? From my point of view, Logan’s quirk doesn’t seem so bad. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it was.
It was a big-enough deal that he was kicked out into the woods to survive on his own. Why was it, though? Are the guys right?
To those who don’t have mental illnesses, are we freaks?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Mavis
As Logan, Sam, and I walk out of the classroom down the hallway, the lights above us flicker. We pause for a moment and look at the bulbs to see the only one flickering is the one directly above us.
I turn around, planning on going back to the classroom to tell Janice about the light, when it stops flickering and goes back to normal.
“Come on, let’s go.” Logan places his hand on my shoulder. His fingernails have obviously been chewed on and the tips of them bit off, leaving not a lot of the pink part left.
Slowly, I turn back. Logan’s hand is still resting on my shoulder, and Sam is a foot or two away, standing with his hands in his pockets. Sam nods us over as he falters forward. Logan lowers his hand from my shoulder and walks by my side as we follow Sam.
I notice the top of one of Sam’s vials sticking out of one of his pants pockets and another vial doing the same thing in one of the other pockets. The longer I watch him walk, the more I realize that he has his pockets full of the vials, and they seem to be weighing him down.
I try to say something but find that I can’t get the words out. I turn my head and look to Logan, who continues to walk beside me. I try to get him to look at me, but he continues to stare and march forward.
A light fixture flickers above Sam, who freezes in surprise. He raises one hand and uses it as a shield for his eyes against the irritating lights. Before he can say anything at all, the mountain shakes. A large rumble and boom take place, sending shock and terror through us all.
Another tremor hits. The walls begin to crumble, releasing a few pebbles at a time. All of the lights flicker and sway on the small wires holding them up.
&nbs
p; The third tremor hits, and one of the strings on the light fixture above Sam snaps. The large metal box swings down, hitting him. The other wire holding it up snaps, dropping the full weight of the fixture onto his body.
A puddle of blood slowly begins to spread underneath the fixture as the fourth tremor hits, and all of the walls crumble over us.
My legs jerk, along with the rest of my body, as I wake from the nightmare. The bed above me shakes as I jolt, and the girls around me jump up as my gasping wakes them. My heart beats rapidly through my chest to my head and feet. Mandy hops down from the bunk above me.
“Hey, hey, shh …” Mandy kneels down and waves everybody off so that they can go lie back down. “Are you okay?”
I nod my head, trying to play off the fact that I just watched someone I love get killed, followed by another person I love and myself getting buried alive.
Mandy rises and pulls off a bag hanging from the top bunk. “Come with me.” She backs up a bit and waits for me to get out of the bed. I stare at her for a moment, then look around the room to see a few of the other girls staring at me.
“Come on,” she reiterates. I finally get to my feet and follow her out of the room to the dimly lit hallways, and she closes the door behind us. “Are you okay?” she asks me, her soft voice somehow echoing through the hall.
I sniffle and bring my hands up to my eyes. I rub until I see spots swirling around the room. “Yeah, fine.” My hands lower to find Mandy staring at me, waiting for further explanation. “It was just a nightmare,” I tell her.
Mandy leans against the wall beside the door. “What happened this time?”
“A bomb.” I think back to the other nightmares, the ones where I was back home. I push those thoughts aside and answer Mandy. I sniffle again and lean on the wall beside her. “Bestellen had dropped another bomb. The walls caved in.”
Mandy nods. She slowly slides down the wall and takes a seat on the ground. “I’m sorry.” She pats the ground beside her, convincing me to sit. I slide down beside her as she looks into my eyes and becomes more serious than I have ever seen her before. “I get those too. In mine, the walls don’t cave in. The floors break, and we all fall through.”
I take a breath and force the words out, “I’m sorry.” Why would she pull me outside if she has her own problems to deal with?
Mandy shrugs. “It’s fine. It’s not your fault.” After a moment or two of silence, she pulls out a purple notebook. The shiny coating of the notebook’s cover makes it hard to read the words written on it due to the glare. She sets the notebook in her lap and pauses.
“Here.” She sighs, handing me the notebook.
It’s thicker than I originally imagined. Mandy sets the book into my lap and opens it up, revealing an amazing rendering of the training room.
“This is my midnight madness.” She turns the page, revealing a drawing of the room caving into itself. “Whenever I have a nightmare, I find that drawing helps me relax and later be able to go back to sleep.”
She turns the page again, revealing a gorgeous drawing of a man who looks strikingly similar to Mandy.
I stop her hand before she flips the page over. “Who’s this?”
She pauses.
“Is he in Bergland?” I ask.
“He … um …” Mandy clears her throat. “That’s my dad.” She turns the page. “Yes. He’s in Bergland. Like everyone else you will see drawn in here, they’re all in Bergland.”
“These are amazing, Mandy.” I continue turning the pages to see drawings of all sorts of different things. All perfect renderings of images I have seen in Bergland, but I keep thinking back to the picture of her dad. “Why is your dad in your nightmare drawings?”
“I don’t just draw my nightmares.” She points to a picture of an odd-looking tree. The branches are very short at the base of its trunk, but they get longer toward the top of the tree. “I draw my dreams too.”
“A tree?”
“I’ve never seen one before.” She shrugs. “It’s just one of those things I have always wanted to do. You know, ‘climb a tree.’”
I chuckle. Never before have I thought about how sheltered these people have been. “Have you ever seen an animal?” I ask.
Mandy nods. “Yeah, we have a floor especially set aside for dogs. But dogs are the only type of animal I have seen.”
“A floor for dogs?”
“Yeah. We train them to, you know, fight. They’re war animals.”
“They’re companions,” I correct her. There were always a lot of stray dogs running around in Bloot, most of which would die of starvation. I always made sure to give any sort of scraps left over from my hunts, like intestines, to the nice dogs that lived near me. Though I never fed any dog more than once, mainly because of the officials’ dog population control, there are a few dogs that I feel I will always remember. Their kindness and willingness to be my friend always warmed my heart.
Mandy shoots me a puzzled look when my claim meets her ears. I can tell she wants to debate but is too tired for it. She pulls a pencil out of her bag and holds it up. “Here.”
I stare at the pencil for a moment, then look back to her. “What?”
“Take it.” Mandy shakes the pencil at me. When it meets my hand, its smooth surface takes me back to when I was younger and would draw with my mother. We would set aside time to spend together and sketch each other or common things around the house while Dad and Steven would be out working.
“For what?” I ask, still holding her journal in my lap.
“For this.” Mandy leans over and flips through her book to a blank page. “This is the same book that Janice gave to me when she was my room advisor. She told me about the therapeutic benefits of drawing and whatnot.”
I look down at the pencil and twirl it in my hand.
“Listen, one thing may work for me, and another may work for you. But will you give this a try?” Mandy looks at me, waiting for an answer. After a moment of silence, she continues, “If you don’t like it, you don’t have to do it.”
I set the tip of the pencil down on the paper and look back to her. “I will.”
She nods and rises to her feet with her backpack. “Come back to bed when you are done.”
As Mandy places her hand on the door handle to open it, I blurt, “Why didn’t you give me the medicine?”
Her hand falls from the handle. “What?”
“The medicine,” I repeat, “like you did the first night I was here. You tried to give me medicine then. Why not now?”
Her soft smile grows. “Because you didn’t need it.” I look to her, confused. She places her hands onto the straps of her backpack and pushes them forward. “You are learning about anxiety, and you are learning to control it. That first night, I offered because you had never had a panic attack before, right?”
I nod.
“So I was just trying to help. Now I think the best way to help you is to help you find out how to control it. Or at least manage without the medicine.”
I look back down to the blank page before me, wondering how she would know what’s best for me or how to help. “How often do you get them? The nightmares?”
“Often enough.”
“That first night, when you told me to trust you about what Janice said … what did you mean?”
Mandy places her hand back onto the door handle and gives me a shy smile. “You aren’t the first person with anxiety Janice has dealt with.”
I nod and raise the pencil. Mandy smiles to me and accepts my silent thank-you as she heads back inside our room. When the door closes behind her, the click of the lock echoes throughout the hallway. I am suddenly much more aware of the empty presence surrounding me. The hallway floors are lined with luminescent paint to help guide the way in case of a blackout, but since the lights are still barely on, the green glow of the line
s are only noticeable to me because of how close I am to the floor.
I look from each end of the empty hallways down to the pencil and paper Mandy gave me. What should I draw? Should I draw Sam and the fixture crushing him? Should I draw myself and Logan, with the walls crumbling down? Or should I go another way and draw the absolutely gorgeous view I got to see from the treetops in the woods? The view of the hundreds of trees and the gorgeous mountains against the beautiful backdrop of millions of stars twinkling away in the sky was one of the best sights I’ve seen in a long time.
No.
Mandy started out in this journal by drawing her nightmares.
So will I.
Logan
After almost a week of training, the aching of my sore muscles has finally began to lessen in intensity. Though they are still sore, I can now walk without looking as stiff as a wooden marionette doll. Mornings are the hardest but have been getting much easier the longer and harder I train. I guess my body is getting used to the daily beating I receive.
Sam has left the room this morning a few minutes before me. I guess he has gotten tired of my morning moaning and groaning. When I finally make it up to the cafeteria, I see the normal morning rush of people scurrying around the room to go sit with their friends or associates.
I see Mavis, John, Sam, Janice, and Mandy all sitting at the same breakfast table that we have been going to since I got here. John continues to smile at Sam and Mavis as he talks to them, telling them something that he must think is extremely clever.
As I enter the cafeteria and make my way over to the table, John leads Mavis and Sam up to the food line. He offers an invitation to Janice and Mandy, but Mandy grabs hold of Janice’s hand and tells John and the others to go ahead. Mandy watches the three walk toward the line as she continues to hold on to Janice’s wrist. After the three are out of sight, Mandy pulls out a notebook from her bag.
Janice takes the notebook from Mandy and asks her something I can’t make out. Mandy sporadically opens the notebook and points at something on one of the pages with a look of slight terror. Janice’s eyes focus on the page as she listens to Mandy jabber on about something. Just as I approach the table, Janice nods to Mandy and says, “I think you may be right.”
