If I’d
thought things would be semi-normal most of the day, I was sorely mistaken. I
shared class with eight boys, and they’d done nothing but whisper and snicker behind
my back all day, not that they’d been very quiet about it. Bets were being made
on how far I’d “go” with Billy on our date tonight. At first the comments had
been relatively harmless, even though they’d still caused my face to burn
red-hot as my embarrassment level had shot off the charts. And then their ruminations
had gotten a whole lot worse.
And
it was irritating the hell out of me.
Mr.
Higgins—Greg, outside school hours—was our teacher. For the most part, he spent
his teaching time reading the torn and stained textbooks word for word, only
allowing us a about ten minutes worth of time for q-and-a’s at the end of each subject.
Every day we started off with English then we worked on Math before moving on
to Science. Mr. Edwards came in during that part of the day since he was our
resident Science Guy. Sometimes he would take us to his lab and show us whatever
inventive masterpiece he’d been working on that day, and other times he merely
bounce ideas off of us. I was one of his favorite students since I seemed to
have a knack for technology, and he always appreciated any input or random
thoughts I had.
Today,
we went over “what went wrong” with his lighting experiment. Last Friday he’d
tested out a new design on a way to light the caves more efficiently. It had
gone so terribly wrong that we’d all had to escape the classroom for the rest
of the day, until the smoke cleared out. Somehow the little light had caught a
chair on fire.
“I
think we overpowered it,” I said when he called on me. “If we can lessen the
wattage that’s being pumped through the light, then there should be less of a chance
of it blowing.”
“Very
good,” Mr. Edwards said approvingly. For so long, we’d relied on fire and
candles to light our way, but with as many supply raids as we’d gone on over
the years, many of those supplies were running low. That need had kicked Mr.
Edwards into action, and he’d started to find a way to light the caves using
light bulbs—which there were plenty of, from what I’d heard. “How do you suggest
we do that?” he asked.
“I
think,” I replied, not waiting for anyone else to answer, “That if we string
more of them together that it would lessen the wattage that’s being forced into
each bulb.”
His
answering grin proved I was right. “And how do we figure out how many bulbs are
needed?”
Well
that all depended on how much was being pumped out of his invention. As he’d
shown us last week, and from my many visits to his lab, he knew it was sort of
like a hybrid generator. They’d brought in some generators they’d found during
a raid a long time ago and decided to fire them up, but soon after the loud
engines were started, our Haven had been attacked by a deviant and we’d lost
two of our men, so that idea had flown out the door as fast as one of those
creatures had found us.
Mr.
Edwards called on one of my classmates, Daylen Roberts, to answer his question,
and the science lesson quickly turned into a math one.
After
Science, we broke for lunch. The whispers were even worse in the mess hall.
Obviously the betting had gone a lot farther than in the classroom. If that
hadn’t been bad enough, all that talk had made its way to Billy, who was now
staring at me with that annoyingly stupid half grin.
I
forced down my soup and roll as quickly as I could, wanting to get a break from
the stares and comments that surrounded me. Of course this had to happen the
day Mom and Dad weren’t here to eat with me. They must have been held up,
because they normally beat me to mess hall and saved a seat for me. It was
sortof a ritual of ours. Family time in the middle of the day to see how
everyone’s day was going. But here I was, eating alone. Taking my bowl over to
the wash basin, I dropped it into the water. As I turned to leave, I ran into
someone large, stumbling as I bounced off him.
“Hey
Em.”
Backing
up a step or two, I looked up, my eyes narrowing. “Billy. What do you want?”
He
snorted and dropped his bowl into the basin as well. “Isn’t it obvious? I
thought we’d discuss our date.”
“You
know,” I said, trying to walk around him. “I think I’m suddenly feeling sick. I
really should cancel. We don’t want to start some sort of epidemic, right? I’d
feel awful if everyone here caught sick just because we went on a date.”
“Ha,”
he laughed, stepping sideways and catching me before I could pass him. “I like
this side of you. I’ve never seen it before.”
“Keep
it up and you’ll see a lot more,” I said. Mentally willing him to go away so I
wouldn’t have to spend any time with him at all. “Let me pass.”
“Soon.
I just wanted to let you know that I’ll be waiting for you when you get out of
class. I don’t want to waste one minute of our date.”
“Fine,
whatever.” I finally pushed around him.
He
stepped to the side, finally letting me by. “See you in a few hours,” he called
out as I rushed from the room.
Copyright © 2014 Katalyn Sage
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