by James Wymore
“No.”
“They’re on the tablets.”
“Oh.”
I glanced over my shoulder and saw the golden light of phantom characters scroll as he brushed his fingers across the stony tablet in his big hand. “You brought a tablet with you?”
He eyed me timidly and nodded.
“Can I see it?”
He extended the little black slate to me without hesitation. The phantom lights blinked off and on again, showing the home screen, or whatever the Mazda demons wanted to call it. I was tempted to just turn my back on the boy and play games until it my turn came to get food, but decided that really would be mean. He didn’t seem like the type of kid who would fight to get his stuff back if you took something away from him. I decided to explain what he didn’t already know about how the tablet worked, and showed him all the phantom apps I knew about. I even read him the armadillo story.
“That’s really sad,” he commented.
“Sad and creepy,” I said. “The other girls up there think it’s a metaphor for obeying the will of our great Lord of Car Dealers.”
The boy snickered. “Car Dealers. I didn’t think of that one.”
I raised an eyebrow, pleasantly surprised by his reaction. I smiled too. “What’s your name again?”
“Call me Beto,” he said. “And you’re Justina?”
“Yep.”
“Have you looked at your song yet?”
I shook my head.
“Mine is a thousand pages long.”
My jaw dropped. “A thousand pages?”
“Yep. How long is yours?”
The app for my ballad was on the home screen. I hesitated before tapping it, wondering if I really wanted to know my life story according to creepy Lord Mazda. I opened the song. Words appeared above musical notes like I’d seen for piano in treble clef with a simple C major key and a hard-looking 6/8 time. I knew a little piano, but the melody looked hard. At least on the first page. Beto helped me skip to its ending. One thousand, thirty-two tablet pages. “We’re supposed to translate this and memorize it?” I said it, not in disgust like I had meant to, but with a quiver in my voice that made bare a growing sense of horror and despair that threatened to sink into a bottomless pit in my gut.
“You think it’s impossible?” he asked.
Something inside me knew better than to say yes. I knew without a doubt that it wasn’t impossible , and I knew Beto knew it too. Everyone knew it. “No. But it’s horrible. It would take a whole day without stopping just to sing the song, maybe longer. It’ll take a whole lot longer just to translate every single word, then figure out how to pronounce it in whatever language it was… Avestan. Then memorize…” A sob caught in my throat. It surprised me. I threw the tablet down, away from me, and it shattered on the floor. “I won’t do it! I won’t sing the song, or memorize it, or do any of that other stupid stuff! I’ll either stay in Hell forever, or Mazda can let me out some other way. But I won’t play this stupid game!”
My will never to touch Hell’s cafeteria food only lasted two hours before I gave into hunger. Beto had managed to make space for us to sit at the end of a long table so we didn’t have to sit on the floor or out in the hall. The place was a mess. Several food fights and massive shoving matches had broken out and died down in the time it took Beto to convince me to stop crying.
Crying. I wasn’t going to let the demon or Hell make me cry. Everyone here was going to cry, though. That was the point of this place, and I knew that now. Emotions were too strong and despair was too deep to keep it all from welling up and spilling over. Already I had seen hundreds of boys crying, some angry, some afraid. All alone. I was no better, no stronger or wiser. Well, Lord Mazda could make us cry if he wanted to, but he couldn’t make me sing.
I poked at a burrito with my fork as I chewed the beans and tortilla into a meaningless paste and forced myself to swallow it in little globs. The food was utterly bland. It literally had no flavor: no sweetness, no salt, no tang, and no spice. I liked my food plain. I didn’t typically grab packets of mayonnaise or ketchup or pickle relish back when I was alive and I bought lunches at school. But this burrito and the bite I had of Beto’s sandwich were all texture and no character. The food certainly wasn’t rotten or stale, but it was incredibly boring. I devoured half the burrito without thought, but struggled now to force it down.
Turmoil roiled all around us. Orderly lines, which had somehow formed in the first twenty minutes of everyone’s first day in Hell, had since dissolved into a constant brawl. A knot of shoving and kicking kids writhed all around the metal bar where standard food magically appeared on pastel-colored plastic trays that slid out of a dark slit in the wall. The only reason I had food at all was because Beto pushed his way through and got food for both of us. I was grateful we’d been able to secure something to eat before the intense hunger everyone seemed to share turned us equally animalistic.
I eyed the Kiosk of Sacrifice, so labeled in big metal letters above a stand in the middle of the finite space packed with hunger-angry boys. The kiosk’s mystery beckoned to my unsatisfied appetite for food—food that wasn’t empty and boring. Like other kids had done, I wanted to hurl my try of nasty food at the floor and wade into the fray once more to fight for something worth eating.
Beto sat next to me on my left side. Those who squeezed in beside us eyed each other and said little until someone finished eating. Whenever a seat vacated, everyone shifted and a new kid somehow peeled out of the chaos to join our company.
Beto stared at the kiosk too. Disgust pinched his own face as he chewed the food in his mouth like a machine. “If you could get anything, what would you get?”
I sniffed and rubbed my eyes. They were still puffy and damp from my defeating tears. I shrugged. “Chocolate ice cream.”
“Mmm, that sounds good.”
I smiled just a little.
Beto said, “If I could get anything, I think I’d get pancakes with Nutella, and bananas, and whipped cream. And a pulled pork sandwich with barbecue sauce.”
My mouth watered. “That sounds really good too,” I said. “I want my mother’s homemade tres leches cake. And her papitas rellenas with sour cream on top. And fried bananas with chocolate sauce, and beef skewers glazed with sweet sauce, and chocolate milk.”
“That’s a lot of chocolate.”
I nodded, and my grin grew wider. “You know what though? I never want to eat vegetables ever again.”
“Me neither.”
We both giggled.
My smile fell, and I went back to picking at my tasteless burrito with my fork. “Why are you being nice to me?”
Beto shrugged. “The whiteboards said to be nice to girls.”
“The whiteboards are stupid.”
“I know you think so.”
I sighed. “It’s stupid because it doesn’t say to be nice to boys, too.”
“Maybe it doesn’t have to.”
I glanced around at the sea of chaos whose currents had somehow left the tables as strange, untouched little oases of order and balance. “Really?”
Beto shrugged again and took another forced bite of his sandwich.
“I wasn’t very nice to you,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay.” He wiped his fingers on his shirt and extended his hand to me. “Friends?”
“Okay. Friends.”
I shook his hand. It was hot and clammy, and still a little gritty from breadcrumbs. His ears turned red. He glanced at his tray and tried very hard to look like he wasn’t smiling. I don’t know why.
“I don’t like not having grown-ups around,” I said. “It’s scary.”
“Yeah,” said Beto. He frowned. “Justina, are you really not going to sing your song?”
I shook my head.
“What if it’s not as hard as it looks?”
“That’s not why I don’t want to sing.”
“Why then?”
I didn’t know how to explain the un
settling feeling in the pit of my stomach, like I was a monkey hovering over a boiling pool of tar. I didn’t know what the feeling meant exactly. “I want to be in control of what happens to me,” I said. “I don’t want someone or something else to make me into something I don’t want to be.”
“What about your brother? You want to find out what happened to him, right?”
I ground the tasteless blob of food between my teeth, trying to stay another wave of emotion and tears. “The whiteboards said to forget about our families.”
“I thought the whiteboards were stupid,” said Beto.
“Yeah…”
I noticed at this moment the main indentation in one corner of both mine and Beto’s plastic food trays were marked and numbered six inches on the short sides and eight inches on the long sides. Six inches and eight inches. Six rows with eight desks per row. Six tablets and eight tablets… Eight rules, and six to follow. Maybe the instructions were that way on purpose after all. But why?
“Mazda’s pretty smart though, isn’t he?” I said. “I hate him.”
When the lights of the strange school dimmed, every child in Hell’s perfect internal clock knew it was time to find a place to sleep. Why, I didn’t know. A part of me wanted to stay up all night, but I didn’t really know what night and day meant here either. I just knew I couldn’t stay awake forever.
Weariness, irritability, and the raw shock of knowing I was dead and that my reality had been permanently warped seeped through me from head to toe. This fueled a strange sense of envy as I watched little groups of boys sort themselves out and trickle into the dormitory across from me. There were no beds, cots, or bunks inside.
I’d already looked into two other identical dormitories to find floors padded with thick foam and three carts: one full of pillows, a second full of blankets, and a third full of clean jumpsuits and boys’ underwear. Maybe with some digging I could find panties in the clothes bins, but the prospect of spending hours hunting made me feel even more fatigued and self-conscious.
Would I find bras somewhere, too? I hadn’t arrived in Hell wearing a bra, even though my mother had started making me wear one every day since the end of the school year. They were annoying sometimes, but I knew I was going to have to get used to them. At least, that was the case when I was alive.
Would we grow up in Hell? The prospect of growing up without my mother and father to help me become an adult terrified me. Every child here was an orphan of sorts now, and we had to look after ourselves for everything.
I was so tired. It would be comforting to be surrounded by other kids, to cuddle up together and feel safe from our impending nightmares in numbers. At home, I wasn’t allowed to sleep next to boys when my brother had slumber parties or when we were on vacation with our cousins. I kind of knew why.
I wished I hadn’t been so negative so that Lina, Ester, and Marissa hadn’t pushed me out of their group. I hadn’t found any other girls. Life as a ten-year-old girl in a Hell packed with ten-year-old boys was going to be very lonely and uncomfortable. Maybe Beto was right to think there was a reason the whiteboards specified being nice to girls in particular.
The whiteboards. The rules. Singing. Not singing. I slid down the wall. The floor was hard. The floor was cold. The floor was mean. Mazda was mean.
“Justina?” Beto loomed tall beside me, arms folded.
“There isn’t going to be any room for me in there,” I said.
“I can make room.”
“I don’t want to sleep in there.”
“Why?”
“Just because.”
“Where are you going to sleep then?”
I growled, “I don’t know!”
Beto sighed. “Don’t go away. I’ll be right back.” He disappeared into the dormitory.
I curled up on my side and waited. When the lights everywhere went out, my thoughts went black. Sleeping was not a choice in Hell.
My turn came to approach the Kiosk of Sacrifice on my second day in Hell. Lines had miraculously taken shape again, and held. While the calmer proceedings of kids snaking their way through the cafeteria was much nicer than the constant brawling of yesterday, there was something weird about the fact no one made us stand in line. At least, no adult or self-appointed leader made us. I couldn’t put my finger on why this was happening, or why it bothered me.
The kiosk’s metal sign stuck up on two stilts over a rectangular stand rooted into the blue marble of the floor. It was a small and unremarkable structure up close, a freestanding version of the bar where the general meals appeared. A sign below the bar read that here we could request whatever we wanted as long as we were willing to pay the price: Any who are brave enough to bloody their knees in submission to the will of Lord Mazda will receive whatever they desire to eat. Read the fable of the Lazy Student on any tablet for more details, and ponder it for greater understanding.
Beto and I read the fable on a tablet we shared while we waited in line. It was about a boy in a faraway country who did poorly in school. He was given several chances to improve his test scores or suffer the consequences. Each time he failed to improve, his punishments became more severe until other students got punished too. First, he was sent home with a warning, and his father spanked him for being lazy. When he chose not to worry and his scores didn’t improve enough to please his school, his friends who spent time with him lost their playtime and were told by their mothers not to be friends with the lazy boy anymore. Then his class lost their funds for a pizza party, and his school lost grants and awards.
At last, the lazy boy’s frustrated teachers dragged him out in front of the whole school and made him kneel on salt. He cried and cried while all the other children laughed and cheered, and his parents and teachers scolded him. Then, according to the story, the lazy boy learned his lesson that if he wanted to accomplish anything, he would have to sacrifice his own blood, sweat, and tears every day of his life.
I hated the story. It didn’t say why everyone thought the boy was lazy. Did he really not care, or did he work very hard and just sucked at taking tests? Why did none of the grown-ups try helping him love hard work instead of scorning him all the time? Did the boy really go away a better person after being humbled, or did he feel like he had to punish himself, hurt himself, every day for the rest of his life because he would always be “lazy” to everyone no matter how hard he tried?
Below the kiosk’s sign was an alcove brimming with opalescent chunks of salt rock. Next to the alcove was a smaller slot with a little sticker above it that read Submit Sacrifice Here.
I’d seen boys ahead of me do this: take a chunk of rock, roll up the legs of their jumpsuits, and grind their knees against the salt until they broke skin. They then submitted their bloody salt chunks into the slot and requested a “blood treat,” as everyone in line called the desired food that came in exchange. The trick was, you could only order one tasty blood treat per day. Others had tried to submit more than one “sacrifice” and left angry or disappointed.
I told Beto how I felt about the fable. He didn’t give an opinion of his own, just listened. He persuaded me to stay in line for the kiosk even though I felt uneasy about what the whole sacrifice ritual was supposed to mean.
“Don’t think about it,” he said. “Lots of people have already gotten their blood treats, and nothing worse has happened to them than anyone else who ate the regular food yesterday.”
I wasn’t sure this was true. We’d only been in Hell two days. Bad things you ate could take a long time to affect you.
“Let’s just try it once to see what it’s all about,” he said. “If bad things happen, we don’t have to come to the kiosk ever again.”
So, here I was. I took a chunk of salt and frowned at it. My stomach growled, angry at the prospect of eating more of Hell’s tasteless food for a whole day. What was I going to get for my sacrifice? I craved ice cream, but that sort of reward would only last five minutes. Maybe I should order an entire carton of ice cream. Bu
t that would melt in a few hours. I thought about getting a large sandwich that I could save for more than one meal.
“Hurry up!” someone called behind me.
“Take your time,” Beto countered. He let me go ahead of him, saying he wanted to be a gentleman.
I rolled up my pant legs, knelt, and positioned the salt rock under my right knee. I bit my lip and twisted my weight back and forth until my knee stung.
With the bloody rock in hand, I stood up and let the leg of my jumpsuit fall back to my ankle. A kid my size rushed up and plucked the bloody salt chunk from my hand.
“Hey!” I shoved and grabbed for my sacrifice, but he quickly slapped it into the slot and hollered for twelve powdered doughnuts in a box. The box appeared instantly.
I screamed and grabbed the box of doughnuts.
The boy grabbed the other end and snarled, “Let go, butthead!”
“They’re mine!” I snarled back. “You stole my rock!” I pounded on his hands and threw punches at his chest with my fist.
He kicked me in the stomach and I fell back against the kiosk, hitting my shoulder hard on the metal bar before my butt smacked the floor. I screamed again in rage and pain.
Before the kid could run away with the doughnuts, Beto caught him by the collar of his jumpsuit. He hoisted the other boy off his feet and threw the kid flat on his back on the ground. The winded boy waited for his breath to return. The box skidded away.
“Leave her alone,” Beto growled. He retrieved the box of doughnuts and held them out to me. “What did you want, Justina?”
I sniffed and shrugged, rubbing my sore shoulder and failing not to cry again. “I don’t know,” I muttered.
As I reached for the doughnuts, two more boys tackled Beto to the ground, punching and clawing at him. He squeezed the flimsy cardboard box of doughnuts against his chest like a ball he kept out of the clutches of an opposing team. The number of boys fighting to get the box away from him grew to six. They got him on his back and raked at his arms.
“Stop it!” I tried to pull one of the boys off him and got elbowed squarely in the diaphragm. It hurt so badly I collapsed on my stomach and couldn’t move. For a long and terrifying moment, I couldn’t breathe.
