Chapter 3
I walk out of the gym and into the hall as other students are starting to arrive, some who have showered and others who have not, depending if they have enough water credits. I go over to my hall locker that has most of its paint peeled off and open it. I keep only a few things in here because, like most of the lockers in the school, this one no longer keeps a combination. I grab a few pencils, an eraser, look up and around at the large mold stains on the ceiling as I close the door. Sandra McCrory walks up to me.
“John, I am wondering if you have an extra pencil I can borrow?” she asks, her attractive blond hair shining in the florescent light of the school.
I know borrow really means have. I have an extra and so I give it to her. Sandra is Sean’s latest thing; Sean is in the Young Army with me, and so I am sure Sandra thinks she can ask me for a pencil. Why she doesn’t ask Sean? It is pretty evident to me that Sandra is little more than a candy girl to him.
Life for most young people in the State of America is very difficult. Getting enough to eat is a struggle, let alone having things like pencils, shampoo, conditioner, soap, paper to do your homework on. But life for a member of the Young Army is abundantly different. We have nice uniforms to wear to school, soda and pizza parties, and candy is plentiful. Girls will go out with boys from the Young Army and sometimes do other things—which of course is prohibited but is done anyway—for the candy. The boys joke and call them candy girls. I do no such thing.
The candy I get, I save and give to my mother, who after church on Sundays gives it away to the small wide-eyed children who gather outside the church building. These children are so hungry and famished it breaks my mother’s heart to have so little to give them. Last Sunday, my mother gave three peppermints to this one little girl who already was at least half starved. The little girl gave my mother a weak smile and asked, “Are you an angel?”
I could see my mother holding back tears as she kissed the little girl on the forehead and answered, “No, princess, but I wish I were an angel, then I could give you all the things you need.”
I don’t have a problem with Sandra, and the pencil is really no loss. I walk to my first-hour class—algebra, which I enjoy a lot—with one less pencil in my backpack. I sit down in my desk; it is old with rust covered legs and has hundreds of names etched into its wooden top. I pull out my textbook. It is tattered and worn, held together by a rubber band with pages missing here and there. I have to make sure I get to class early to discuss with the teacher, Mr. DeFuniak, what pages we will be using in order to see if I have the appropriate pages to do the practice equations. If I don’t, he will make a copy of it for me. But he can’t do that for everyone, so some people get a zero because they don’t have the right pages.
Mr. DeFuniak’s clothing is shabby and unkempt. He has little to work with and is constantly running out of chalk. This makes teaching algebra very difficult, but I still enjoy it. After thousands of years, A2+B2 still equals C2. After class, it is on to history and the falsified glories of the State. I know the real history; my father and mother make sure I know it. Those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it, my father would often state. If you don’t know your history then you don’t know who you are. How can you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been? Then I go to science, which is kind of a joke with only one microscope, a few Bunsen burners, and a Petri dish or two.
Finally, it is lunch. I am starving; not having breakfast is really getting to me. Food in the cafeteria is little more than gruel and only the most desperate eat the food there; others bring whatever they can afford from home. I know I am in for a treat; my mother had been able to get hold of a ham last week and had carefully, lovingly cured it. We feasted on that ham Sunday, and we were still enjoying the blessings of the ham on Monday as Mother added the ham bone into some dry beans, slowly cooking them over a hot stove, creating the most delicious pork and beans we had eaten last night with some homemade bread.
Normally, we eat beans with no flavoring except their own and these beans are not some soft beans from a can or fresh from a garden. No, these beans are hard, old, dried beans that have a pungent taste when eaten alone and take hours to soften and do so only after they’ve been soaked in water for a whole day. Forget to soak your beans and your family would go hungry for a very long time.
I realize we are very lucky to have a licensed garden with fresh fruits and vegetables my mother cans and carefully preserves. Most homes are not allowed to grow a garden based on the State’s laws, which I do not understand. Especially if all families could do this, it would prevent a lot of suffering. But the State has no interest in people, only in what they can give or do for the State. Things have improved since I joined the Young Army. An example of this was the added privilege of the ham; sugar is sometimes given to us, lemons on occasion, and an orange is a rare gift.
I sit down at what most consider is the popular table, but I am here because it is expected of me as a member of the Young Army to sit with the others of my squad. And they sit at the popular table. Popular I may be, but not in your traditional way. Not in the way of putting others down to make myself look good, not in the way of dating the right girls and going to the right parties. I am popular because I try to do the right thing. I try to help people where I can, and most people either respect me or like me for it. Some, of course, do not, but those I ignore. Others like me because I am the top recruit in the Young Army, better than anyone has seen in years. I am glad of this, especially of the special privileges this has given my family. But I wonder at what cost.