by James Wymore
Two of the boys peeled away and managed to rip one of the poles off the kiosk. A stocky boy with a wild mixture of fury and glee in his eyes slammed the pole down on Beto over and over and over. At last, they tore the crushed box free, howling in triumph as they ran past the long, orderly lines and out of the cafeteria.
I coughed. “Beto?” I shook his shoulder, then gasped and slid back. His jaw lay open. His left eye socket was smashed in. Blood pooled and seeped into the cracks where the kiosk’s metal stabbed into the stone floor.
“He’s dead!” I shrieked. “They killed him!”
“He’ll come back to life tomorrow, stupid,” another boy hissed in my ear. “You troublemakers deserved it anyway.” He stepped over Beto and took a chunk of salt.
I bolted out of the cafeteria, collapsing in the middle of the hallway across from the closest bathroom. I vomited and curled up in a ball, shaking with shock.
More boys jeered at me as they passed by. “Look, it’s that troublemaker who doesn’t want to leave Hell.”
“Troublemaker! Troublemaker!”
“Where’s your bodyguard, Troublemaker?”
“I guess she doesn’t like the food. Too bad she’s going to stay here forever.”
“Why don’t you sing a song your mommy taught you to make yourself feel better, stupid?”
“The whiteboards say to be nice to girls, but you’re not a girl. You’re a troublemaker.”
They laughed. Every once in a while, someone would kick me in the leg or the side for no good reason. How did every kid in Hell seem to know who I was? Why had they dubbed me “Troublemaker?” Did no one care that Beto lay in a gory heap like a barbaric Mayan sacrifice in front of the kiosk?
I couldn’t speak. Mercifully, I lost my appetite for the rest of the day as well. When the lights dimmed, I snuck into the closest dormitory, retrieving a pillow and a blanket. The boys jeered at me some more and told me to get out, that they didn’t want troublemakers in their midst. I found an empty classroom and curled up on the marble floor until the lights went out and I fell into that forced, dreamless sleep cycle of all children in Hell.
I didn’t move from that classroom for two days. I didn’t eat, I didn’t drink. Peed in my jumpsuit a couple of times. Tablets I broke, shifted, or placed somewhere else in the room were always restored back to their orderly six rows of eight. Any desks I moved were always back in their perfect six rows of eight too. The only things not restored in the classrooms each day were the instructions on the whiteboards. As other children raced from room to room in giddy, destructive fits, everything they erased in this room was gone. I assumed it was the same everywhere else.
I wondered… if I could erase every whiteboard, maybe I would forget the instructions to get out of Hell? Then I’d be stuck forever like I wanted. Then I worried about making everyone else stuck in Hell, and the stupid “Lazy Student” fable swirled around in my head. This proved to be wishful thinking, anyway, because after I erased this whiteboard, my memory of the instructions didn’t go away. I realized quickly they were always going to be as clear and sharp in my mind as I had seen them my first day.
Eight rules, six to follow. The one with no consequences listed had consequences after all. Sort of… No, not really. At least, not consequences that made much sense. Why did the instructions tell us not to erase the whiteboards if we could wipe them clean forever, but we would remember everything they said anyway? It was stupid. Everything was stupid! Then again, maybe that was one of the two rules that didn’t matter… Did any of them matter, though? What was the point of this whole thing?
Don’t think about it, I heard Beto’s voice say in my mind. So I stopped thinking about it. I also realized that I did want to leave Hell very badly. I wanted to know how my parents were doing, what had happened to my brother. I just didn’t want to be… an armadillo, an empty shell turned into a flute instead of a life. A flute… It doesn’t make sense. Why doesn’t anything make sense? Does that mean something? I didn’t cry this time. I just sank into myself.
My hunger didn’t go away or reset each day like everything else did, and the festering horror inside me didn’t magically disappear. The image of Beto’s smashed head wasn’t going to fade away either. I was going to go crazier and crazier until… what? Was craziness endless? Bottomless? What would happen to me?
Maybe Beto had gone to a better place now, gotten into Paradise. Or maybe he’d ended up back in front of that demon, shuffled into another Hell. Could I die my way out of Hell? I lay curled up in front of the whiteboard with my eyes closed, determined to waste away and die there, when I heard someone come in the room. Other kids usually didn’t stay very long, and they didn’t bother me much if I stayed quiet and still in my little corner. Someone shook my shoulder and, with a whimper, I tensed.
“Justina.”
I jolted and looked up at Beto. He smiled, and there was no sign his head had ever been less than perfectly formed.
“I’ve been looking everywhere for you. I thought you’d gone and left Hell without me already.”
I sat up and threw my arms around his neck, startling him. I cried and cried, and kissed his cheeks three times. He didn’t pull away or act embarrassed. He just hugged me back.
When I finished crying, I blew my nose on my sleeve. He patted my back and held up a pair of great big, juicy, sweet-smelling barbecue sandwiches in separate paper trays. His ears and face were bright red. “Are you hungry? I don’t know if you like pork.”
I nodded, and even smiled a little. He gave me the sandwich, and we sat side-by-side, tearing ravenously at our food. The barbecue sauce was sweet. The meat was salty, juicy, porky like only real pork can taste. The bun tasted like real bread. Good bread.
He said, “Did you know you can only ask the kiosk for one thing every day, but you can ask for as much as you want? I asked for two sandwiches yesterday, two the day before, and two today. I figured I’d eat one for breakfast, and if I didn’t find you I’d eat the second one before lights out. That’s what I did yesterday and two days ago.”
“Thank you,” I managed quietly. After we finished eating and wiped off the excess barbecue sauce from our fingers and faces on our clothes, we sat in silence for a while. “Why did you do that?” I asked.
“Do what?”
“You know. Why did you get two sandwiches every day even though I ran away and you couldn’t find me?”
He shrugged. I thought he would say something again about how the whiteboard said to be nice to girls, or maybe how he hadn’t made any other friends in Hell yet. “Well, it’s because… because…” He swallowed and scratched one of his ears, which had turned bright red. “I like you.”
I looked at him, and he slapped his hand over his eyes. “You mean you like like me?”
“Yeah.” He took a deep breath but didn’t take his hand away from his eyes. “Do you… do you like me too?”
I thought about it, and my face burned. I got why his face was red now. “Yeah, a little.”
He looked at me with one eye through his hand and giggled, turning even redder. I think we were having a blushing contest now. “Can I…?”
“What?” I asked.
“Can I kiss you?”
I screwed up my nose in disgust. “Kiss me?”
“I mean… not kiss you kiss you. Just on the cheek. You know, like you kissed me?”
“Oh.” My face grew warmer still. I hadn’t meant to kiss him because I liked him liked him. I think. He was my friend, and the last time I saw him his head was… I didn’t want to think about that right now. “Yeah. Okay.”
He leaned over and, shaking, quickly kissed my cheek. He leapt up and ran away to the other side of the room. I’d never seen a boy as big and tall as he was for his age giggle so much.
“Hey, wait for me!”
I chased him around the room, giggling as we tried to tickle each other and kiss-tag each other’s hands and cheeks. Beto was strong, and he pushed me hard enough to make me fal
l over a couple of times when he tried to get away. The third time, he pushed me too hard and I tripped over a desk and fell on my back. I laughed, but he looked unhappy and pulled me to my feet.
“Sorry,” he said. “I don’t know my own strength sometimes.”
“It’s okay. You didn’t hurt me.” I held his hand, which made him giggle again.
He cleared his throat. “So, I was thinking, if we’re going to stay in Hell forever, we should make a plan so we don’t get bored.”
I frowned. “Wait, you want to stay in Hell forever too?”
“Well, I don’t want my new girl… best friend to be alone forever.”
“What about your family? Don’t you want to see them again?”
He shrugged. “I think you want to see your family again too, even though you don’t want to do things the Car Dealer King’s way.” I smiled at that, and he continued. “But I don’t know if we’re really ever going to see them again. If we do see them, we might not know them as family anymore, you know? And the demon lady put us together in the same place. Maybe we’re supposed to be friends, or maybe it was an accident. But it’s nice to have someone around to be your friend or your family for… you know… a long time.”
That thought was deep and a little bit frightening. I thought about letting go of Beto’s hand, but I didn’t. “What if we don’t like each other forever?”
He shrugged. “Maybe that’s when we’ll leave.”
We both frowned this time. “Hell is stupid,” I said. I led him over to the shelves and handed him a tablet. “I hear there are some really fun games on these things. Should we try them out?”
Ten years into our denial, Beto and I exhausted every game the tablets had to offer until we hit a certain irrevocable boredom with them. I knew I was never going to play the tablet games ever again out of sheer disgust that there was nothing new to discover or do. No new games had appeared in that time.
Because our memories never faded in Hell, there was no chance of giving the games a break and coming back later with fresh enthusiasm or rediscovery. Once learned, everything to know about every game became stored permanently in our brains in perfect detail. Games no longer had the power to drown out that itch in my mind that someday I would actually leave Hell despite my resolution never to sing.
I always have a choice, I told myself. I don’t have to sing ever again if I don’t want to. But I didn’t have a choice. Not really. Like time and space, morality worked differently in Hell. You could hurt anyone you wanted to and it didn’t matter because everything broken would be restored when the lights turned back on and you woke up. Choice was literally a delusion. I knew I couldn’t stay in Hell forever, like I knew my name, and knew every moment of my mortal life in all its bittersweet detail. Someday, something would compel me to learn that ballad, and I would to sing it.
Fortunately, remembering was not the same as understanding or being constructive. Once, out of curiosity, I looked over the first ten pages of my ballad on the tablets. I could still recall the images of words and notes on each page perfectly, but keeping all those images in their correct order in my mind took effort. A lot of my song had parts that were worded exactly the same way as other parts, and there were places in the music that told me to go back to other sections and sing them again before moving ahead.
Retaining the words and the images of the notes in my mind was only a small part of the equation. I would have to train myself on which parts to repeat, and I still had to figure out by ear what sounds went with which notes. Learning this song would be more complicated than it had first appeared, as impossible as it had seemed anyway, but I wished I knew nothing about music at all.
“What are we going to do now?” asked Beto. He lay on his back beside me on the padded floor of the fully lit dormitory we now occupied. He set his tablet aside like I had done and folded his hands behind his head. We were still boyfriend and girlfriend, even though we knew each other so well now we acted more like siblings than normal friends. There was a lot more teasing and bluntness; even meanness sometimes that didn’t faze either of us anymore.
“Maybe we could get Daniel and Jacob to go exploring with us,” I said.
“There’s nothing to explore, though. Every classroom and every cafeteria and every dormitory down every length of hallway is exactly the same.”
“The people aren’t, though. And we haven’t found the end of the hallway yet.”
“Maybe the hallway never ends.”
“Or maybe it’s round like the Earth, and it only seems like it goes on forever.”
“Nobody wants to go really far away from our group in case we get lost and never find the spot where we live again.”
“Well, we need something to do to keep from getting bored and wanting to leave. Those two don’t want to leave either.”
“I don’t want to leave our group or split everyone up. It took us a long time to find good friends in here.”
“What are you going to do when all our good friends leave Hell?”
“That won’t happen for a long time.”
I sighed.
We’d traveled a long ways down the hallway from where we first arrived to get away from all the people who knew us and called us troublemakers. Now we shared a dormitory with a large group of kids, both boys and a few more girls, who didn’t care that Beto and I wanted to stay in Hell forever. A handful of them even felt the same way. For the majority who wanted to get out, we simply all agreed not to interfere with each other’s efforts either way. Meals turned into a community routine where we voted on what we wanted to eat that day and each ordered our limited one item in bulk from the kiosk so everyone got something both tasty and well-rounded to eat.
I liked the girls in our little community a lot. They were smart—smarter than me. A lot of the boys were too. We figured out amongst us that those who experienced a more traumatic death had a harder time coping with life in Hell. Trauma didn’t make you dumb. It just made it harder to think, harder to learn. Harder to… well, no one grew up here, so that didn’t matter.
The other girls in our little community hadn’t been through traumatic deaths quite like having a bear rip out their throats, like I did. Abby from Austin, Texas passed away from a freak illness in her sleep, surrounded by family. Susana from Orlando, Florida, died instantly after her bedroom collapsed into a sinkhole. And so forth.
“We could get married,” said Beto, pulling me out of my thoughts.
I looked at him, and he looked at me. “There’s no marriage in Hell,” I said.
“We could make marriage in Hell. The whiteboards didn’t say anything about it.” Most of the whiteboards we knew about had been wiped blank by now. Hence we referred to the instructions they once bore in past tense.
“I don’t want to get married.”
“Why not?”
I looked back up at the blue marbled ceiling. It amazed me how a pattern that once seemed endlessly pretty could feel so dull when it was the only thing you ever saw in the walls, floor, and ceiling anywhere. “I want to wait until I’m grown up.”
“We are grown-ups.”
“No, we’re not.”
He huffed in frustration. “We’re never growing up, Justina. There’s nothing to wait for.”
“Maybe we’ll grow up when we leave…” I caught myself too late.
He retorted, “Ready to give up and leave now that we’ve played every game on the tablets a thousand times?”
“Shut up.”
He glared at me. “I was just trying to think of something that would keep us from getting bored.”
My ears burned. “Well, not that.”
“What?”
I glared back at him. We broke gaze. We said nothing for a while, then a twinge of panic plucked at me. “Beto, are you going to stop being my boyfriend if I don’t marry you?”
“Maybe if you don’t marry me ever.”
“Oh.” The panic swelled. I braced myself. Maybe this would be the moment
Beto had predicted ten years ago, when we would finally get bored of each other and stop being friends.
He didn’t seem happy with his answer either, though, because out of the corner of my eye I saw him frowning.
“I’m not trying to be mean,” I said.
“I know. It’s just not fair being stuck like this forever, never growing up, is it?”
I hated our absurd state of mind, too, having more than adult consciousness about everything we experienced, but confined to our never-changing ten-year-old abilities to reason against it. “When I was alive, there were times when I used to think I never wanted to grow up. There were other times too when I really wished I was grown up, and my parents would tell me to enjoy being a child while it lasted.”
“Yeah, my parents said that to me, too. I’ll bet our parents never guessed our childhood would last forever. Never growing up is not as nice as it seems when it’s real.” He took my hand. “It’s okay, Justina. I’ll still be your boyfriend. I don’t really know what grown-ups feel when they talk about marriage and romantic things anyway. I think you’ve got the right idea. I’ll wait too.”
I sighed in relief.
Daniel rushed into the dormitory, his deep brown complexion rosy with exertion. “Bear! Sloth!”
“Hawkman!” Beto greeted.
Those of us determined to stay in Hell came up with animal nicknames for each other many years ago in defiance of the armadillo fable. Call us anything but blind armadillos. We weren’t going to sacrifice who we were to become to some empty shell of a musical instrument for the Lord of Car Dealers’ amusement.
We gave Beto the nickname of “Bear,” because he was the biggest boy in our group and he was everybody’s protector. He thought I wouldn’t like that name because a real bear killed me. I didn’t actually hate bears, though, and I liked the healing irony that a “good bear” was my best friend now. Because I was the slowest at games our group invented to play together, taking my time to be thorough and precise enough to exploit the rules in creative ways, I was given the affectionate nickname of “Sloth.”
