“Oh, I was one of the first,” she said. She folded her arms across her chest.
“How long was that?”
“Two and a half years, I think. I don’t keep track anymore.”
“How many people were here then?”
She shook her head, her smile disappearing. “Not many. Fifteen. They’re all gone now.”
The line moved forward a few feet.
“Gone where?”
Her voice hushed, and she absently ran her finger along the wood panels on the wall. “Detention, most of them. No one got out, if that’s what you mean. People used to try harder to escape back then.”
A girl with black hair and a round face ran up next to Jane, giving me a quick glance before speaking rapidly in hushed tones. “Did you hear about the punishments?”
Before Jane had a chance to reply, the girl continued, “Curtis and Carrie got no food all day and hard labor.”
“What?” Jane looked stunned. “They never do that. Not together.”
“I know,” the girl said. “I don’t know what it is, but Dylan took them outside.”
Jane shook her head, and the round-faced girl hurried off to spread the story.
“Is that for running after the car?” I asked.
Jane nodded. “The punishments get worse every time. I keep telling Carrie to stop.”
I wanted to continue talking, to press her for details, but she’d turned away slightly, not looking at me anymore.
After a few moments we turned the corner and entered the cafeteria. I’d been expecting the usual arrangement—huge pans of sloppy food under sneeze guards, being dished up by bored people with ice-cream scoops. Instead, I found a wall with hundreds of tiny doors. It almost looked like rows of mailboxes in the post office, except that these boxes had small windows and lights.
Jane handed me a tray. “You get one main course, one side, and one drink. It scans the chip in your watch.” She was smiling, but looked tired and lost in thought.
I peered in the little windows and saw gorgeous plates of food: enchiladas, fried chicken, lasagna, and half a dozen other things. As others opened the little doors the smells of the kitchen poured out.
I tried to look through the doors to the kitchen behind but couldn’t see anything.
Jane opened one and pulled out a salad, heaped with chicken and blue cheese.
“Not bad, huh?” she said. “It tastes as good as it looks.”
I finally chose a plate of fettuccine Alfredo. I’d only ever had it as a frozen dinner, but even then it was good. A tiny display above the window lit up as I opened it and the words benson fisher, 1 entree scrolled across.
I put the plate on my lunch tray and then followed Jane to the side dishes.
“When I heard that Havoc ran the cafeteria I’d thought they would spit in my food or something.”
“They probably would if they could see who was taking it,” she said, standing on the tips of her toes to look in a high window.
I opened a door and took a small plate holding two bread sticks. “They don’t seem worried about breaking rules.”
“A lot of people break rules,” she said. “But some of the rules are more serious than others. If you try to escape, you’ll get detention. On the other hand, if you don’t wear your uniform, your gang will just lose points.”
She picked a bowl of fruit and put it on her tray, and then motioned with her head for me to follow her. Around the next corner was a row of vending machines with drinks.
“The gang will lose the points?” I asked.
“Yep,” she said. “They do that so that the gangs will keep their members in line. If one of the V guys wasn’t shaving, then the rest of us would tell him he has to. Seriously, the school has this all figured out. They make us obey.” She popped a crouton in her mouth.
“I saw that shaving rule,” I said with a forced laugh. “Do girls have that one, too?”
“Worse than a rule.” Jane grinned and gestured to her legs. “We have to wear skirts. Every day.”
There wasn’t as much selection in the drink machines—just juice and milk. Still, there was no way I was going to complain about my lunch. If it tasted anything like it smelled, it would be the best meal I’d had since two foster families ago.
I chose a bottle of orange juice, but as we turned to leave I noticed a panel of darkened windows on the far wall. The word discipline was on a sign above it.
“What are those?”
“More fun,” she said. “Sometimes the punishment is like what Curtis and Carrie got—no food at all. Sometimes it’s just that you’ll only get certain kinds of food. They don’t use it much.”
“Have you ever been punished?”
Jane laughed. “Everyone gets punished.”
I followed her outside. The cafeteria’s back wall was floor-to-ceiling windows, and a door was propped open letting in the cool autumn breeze. Jane told me that the V’s always ate on the bleachers unless the weather wouldn’t let them. I liked to think it was because they were getting a few steps closer to freedom, leaving the confines of the building whenever they could. But it was probably just for the fresh air and to get away from the Society and Havoc. Even so, I loved being outside, and my mind instantly flew back to the wall.
A grappling hook might work. There had to be rope here somewhere.
But first I was going to eat.
I walked next to Jane who, despite her skirt, didn’t seem to mind the chilly November air. She’d been here for two and a half years—how old had she been when she came? Fourteen? Fifteen? I thought of Mason. He was young, too. This was bad enough for me—it must have been a lot worse for the younger ones.
We were the last of the V’s to get to the bleachers. The girl from the window was there, her brown hair pulled into short pigtails. She gave me a little wave as she chewed her food.
I counted sixteen V’s—eighteen including Curtis and Carrie, who were still off somewhere working. Mason told me that it was the smallest of the gangs; the Society was biggest by far—about double what we were—and Havoc made up the rest. Jane said there were sometimes a few holdouts who refused to join any gang, but they didn’t last long. People needed their gangs.
I was the center of attention for a while, answering questions about where I was from and what my life was like before Maxfield, but for the most part the group kept up a normal lunch conversation—how much they hated class, how one girl was excited for winter, how another wondered when we’d get another school dance. No one talked about escape. I tried to bring up the subject once, but it died out fairly quickly.
The whole time we sat there I kept an eye on the trees. There were Society kids out there. One was at the tree line, patrolling on the back of a four-wheeler. I could hear a second one, but couldn’t see it.
What would make them act like that? Why wouldn’t they just make a break for it?
As I watched them I thought about what they’d need to have to keep the four-wheelers running: gasoline, oil, tools. All of that could help my escape.
After lunch we sat through another class on aesthetics and then had a break. The schedule on the TV screen called it study hall, but Mason told me that no one ever had homework other than reading the textbooks—which we were never tested on anyway—so most people just hung out in the dorms or took a nap.
I explored. Aside from the dorms, the fourth floor had a long common room with heavy wooden tables and leather couches. It smelled like dust and was completely empty.
The third floor was all classrooms—there had to be thirty of them, all almost identical. I tried to do some math in my head. There were seventy-four kids in the school, and my classroom held about twenty-five. So only three or four rooms were being used. Did that mean more kids were on the way? There was plenty of room for them.
Mason had told me that for a while, about a year ago, there were new students every week, sometimes two or three at a time. But then it tapered off. I was the first one in four months—Lily was the last before me.
The second and first floors were more interesting: the library (which didn’t seem to have a single book written in the last hundred years), the cafeteria, the trophy room, a few large multipurpose rooms, a tiny theater, and a dozen small rooms that had no furniture. All of the architecture in these rooms was amazing, with stained
