Cages (14 page)

Sure it does, Dave had
said.  Dave won.

At least paint a smile on
them.  All our other suns are happy, they argued.

No, smiles take too long, Dave
countered.  Dave won.

At least paint them yellow!
they had exhorted.  Who ever heard of a silver sun?

I think silver works, Dave
reasoned.  Dave won. 

They had given up even asking
why each sun had a hole poked through the middle and just went with it. 
With all the decorations that were going up a few stupid party favors weren't
going to hurt.  And, you know, everyone liked Dave and didn't want to rain
on his parade.

I had taken over Dave's job of
handing out the suns, which earned me glares from the Banner Society but
,
you know,
screw
them. 

Maybe someone would wonder
why, out of every single resource in the entire Quarantine, I would focus my
attention to exploiting the Banner Society so often.  What makes them so
poweful?  It's because they're the propaganda team.  Write a word on
the wall and it's graffiti.  Write a word on a banner, display it
attractively, and it becomes a force in its own right.  No one challenges
its right to be there, its right to say whatever it says. People believe them,
and tend to do what they say. In retrospect I wished I hadn't squandered my
cache with the Banner Society so early, but if I hadn't I never would have won
Remi, Dave and Ben over to my side in the first place.  So, opportunity
well spent, I supposed.

I learned the art of breaking
another man's spirit from my dad, one of the few things I can actually credit
him with teaching me, and one of the most valuable things I could ever have
learned.  The key is not always to resort to physical violence. 
"The only way beating a man up works is if he's ashamed of being
weak," he had said, sipping a M
arietta
Lite on his dusty green patio chair one
afternoon.  "Embarassing a man sometimes works, but only if that man
has a fear of being embarassed.  There are two ways to go about breaking a
man right.  One, find out what he's ashamed of and hit him with it like a
n
aluminum bat.  Or, if he's
particularly resistant to that sort of fun, find out what he thinks his
strengths are and turn them against him.  Does he think being physically
strong makes him better than everyone else?  Find a way to make his
strength shameful to him.  Does he think he's smarter than everyone? 
Find a way to make his intellect laughable.  They're both good methods,
but only the second one is guarunteed to work."

As blunt as my father was, he
had been right.  I saw him destroy one of his drinking buddies by turning
his ability to drink anyone under the table into a sign of a pathetic alcoholic
once, just because he wouldn't give back a drill he borrowed.  It was
stunningly effective, and my dad had his drill back before nightfall.

Kate walked into the
basketball court dressed down.  Some girls wore sparkly dresses, some
tight little black numbers
, smuggled in by giddy moms who remembered
their own Homecoming dances with nostalgia and loss
.  Kate wore jeans and a T-shirt, but to me
that was part of her charm.  I bowed slightly and handed her a silver sun.

"What's this?" She
said, looking at the cardboard disgustingly.  "I didn't figure you
for the party favor type."

"Symbols are
important," I said gravely.  "You should know that."

"So I guess you gave
up."  She shook her head. 

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I didn't come here
with you, as you might have noticed."

I sighed, then flashed a
grin.  "But I think you'll be leaving with me."

Kate raised her
eyebrows.  "You're going to do something to prove your innocence
here?"

I shrugged.  "Why
not take a party favor and see how it goes?"

Kate took a silver sun and
rolled her eyes.  "You had better not ask me to dance."

"I don't dance."
 
I was disappointed.  I had expected at least a little playful
banter.  She hadn’t even cracked a smile.

The floor was packed with
people, and I was surprised to discover the divisions that had split the middle
school dances in half were completely gone.  The separations were varied
and more subtle now, no longer defined by the easy measure of gender. 
Dave was putting in face time with the jocks and the cheerleaders.  Ben
was nestled deep in the quietest corner of the court with six or seven other
taciturn wallflowers.  Kate hove to the Literature Club, which was huddled
near the concession stand.  I supposed if I were to be anywhere, that
should be it, but somehow I knew I wasn't welcome. 

Someone poured punch over my
head, but I didn't care.  Tonight I would redeem myself.

There was a riser erected at
the far end of the court and it was there that Principal Conyers walked up to
the microphone that seemed to grow from it like a New Year's Christmas
tree.  He had on a dark blue suit jacket, with the one empty sleeve pinned
up in a fold at the elbow.  His two guards kept to the floor on either
side of the riser, MP5s clutched warily in their hands.  They eyed every
student with a special brand of malice in their eyes I rarely saw from the
other guards. 

He coughed once, then spread
his arms out wide.  "Welcome to the Homecoming Dance!"

The kids cheered and he stood
there like Eva
stinking
Brone, drinking it in. 

"I just want to
congratulate you all on a year well done.  You'll be happy to know that on
average test scores are up, our wonderful basketball team is about to head to
the championships in Tennessee and on average college scholarships have risen
four percent.  Give yourselves a hand!"  Conyers was grinning
like an idiot, bathed in the jubilation of kids who couldn't give a
crap
about test scores but were just happy to
have something to cheer about.  "And...what's this?"  One
of his guards handed him one of Dave's silver suns off the floor.

My lips drew back in a smile.

Conyers glanced at me, a smug
little grin on his own face.  "Why, you know what this looks
like?"  He stuck his finger through the hole and spun the sun around
so that instantly there was no doubt as to what it really was.  He
mimicked the mock sawblade going just past the stump of his arm, mugging and
laughing to the crowd. 

My smile quickly fell.

They were quiet at first, but
once they saw it was okay to laugh at, the rest of the students broke out into
loud guffaws, laughing not at Conyers, who had trumped the joke by taking it
for himself, but at me.  Subtle or non-subtle, I had let it be known that
it was me who had kicked off the manufacture of the silver suns, that tonight
was the night I was going to make my mark on Conyers.  Dave had casually
let it leak, and I'm sure Kate hadn't been tight-lipped about it either. 
Conyers had beaten me effortlessly and the whole Quarantine saw it.  He
was brazenly and openly winking at me, shaking his head as if to say
sorry
kid, better luck next time.

I held my head in my hands,
covering my face.  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Dave's stricken
expression, Kate's pitying head-shake.

Conyers let his last laugh
fade out, then declared "Let's get this party started!  Ms. Hutchins,
you'd better save me a dance!"  Then, clapping and laughing, he took
a step towards the edge of the riser.  The din of the students instantly
hushed, an audible sucking sound as everyone gasped.  Conyers teetered in
mid-air for a second, but then he fell to one knee, the glue I had coated the
riser with releasing his shoe only reluctantly.  He threw down his one
hand to catch himself and everyone could hear the slimy smack as it sank into
the glue. 

I raised my head now, no
longer needing to hide my laughter. 

Conyers looked confused at
first, but as he tried to tug his arm free I could see the understanding
widening in his eyes.  The glue I used bonded only lightly with rubber and
leather, but glommed onto human skin like a starfish.  Another of my
hidden tricks, a gift from James hidden in the bottom half of three of my tubes
of toothpaste.  I know, it was a juvenile stunt, a stupid sitcom trick,
but I'll be
darned
if it
didn't work like a charm.  Conyers raised his eyes to me, horror in his
face.

I held up one of Dave's silver
sawblades and pantomimed sawing my right arm off.

The students laughed.  It
wasn't the polite, friendly laughter Conyers had gotten earlier.  This
laughter was ugly, mocking, the cackle of a servant who had seen his unjust
master fall face-first in the mud. 
They all spun their saw blades
on their fingers. 

Rage filled Conyers face and
he actually drooled as he pointed his stump at me and shouted: 
"Solitary!  Solitary, now!"

The two guards flanking him
burst into action, grabbing me up by my elbows, ripping the silver sun from my
finger and tossing it away.  I exited to cheers as the guards kicked open
the court doors and hauled me off.

And I smiled all the way.

Solitary was just that. 
The Quarantine was two stories of sectioned fortress hallways built of gray
brick and iron bars, but the bank of Solitary cells seemed to have been a late
addition to the structure, a squat, ugly metal tumor on the Social Studies hall
exterior.  The Bell, as the students called it, housed six Solitary cells,
where only the worst of juvenile offenders went when they crossed the
line.  The door stood like a monolith in the hall, a slab of metal
straight from a million Cold War prison biopics.  Once you breached the
door, the interior was a simple circle ringed by six lozenge-shaped
hatches.  Very nautical; it felt, many said, like what they thought the
inside of a diving bell would feel like, hence the name.  Each door
boasted only one window, a porthole window with six-inch-thick glass. 

The psychology behind the Bell
was a bit strange, I thought as the guards waited for the door to unlock. 
This hub of prison doors was the most secure in the Quarantine.  Any teen
going Beast in there had no hope of escape, even at its strongest.  Yet
here is where the unruly were kept, as if by the very bucking of authority they
had marked themselves for Beastdom.  I remembered Conyers's claims and
wrinkled my nose.  No one could tell who was going to go Beast, and so
far, as I understood it, no one in the Bell ever had.  More likely the
Bell was an abandoned experiment in effeciency.  Can we just lock all the
kids up in seperate cells and just not worry about it?  Turns out, no, not
if you wanted sane adults at the end of it.

I knew both people in
Solitary.  Remi, obviously, but one other, a girl named Susan who had gone
to Quarantine six months ahead of me.  I had known many of the other
students all my life.  This Quarantine was fed by two different middle schools,
so half of them were strangers, but there were a lot of familiar faces. 
What was more interesting was how Quarantine changed everything.  There
were kids here at whose houses I had spent the night, boys I had played ball
with in kindergarten, girls I had pretended not to like while in reality liking
them very much.  But they weren't the same people.  You could see it
in their eyes. 
T
he walk
past the metal detectors changed you.  These people weren't my friends
anymore.  The only friends I had shared a room with me.
 
Dorm cell groups tended to bond very
tightly.

The metal slab clacked and
opened, Conyers's two guards backing me up to give the door room to
swing.  The door was controlled by an operator in the Security Office, an
unseen part of the school
, behind the steel fences of the Security
Wing. 
The interior was shaped
like the top of a mosque, walls all curving toward a central high point at the
top.  A lectern at the center was ringed by a low handrail, placed so that
the occupants of the cells could press their faces against the glass of their
porthole windows and recieve their lessons from the Solitary Shift Teacher, who
was rotated in and out on a weekly basis.

Two of the six hatches had
green "Occupied" stickers over them, and I was shoved roughly next to
one occupied cell and directly across from the other.  I surveyed the room
as the hatch slammed closed with an ear-splitting clang of metal on
metal.  A scraping corkscrew sound was the guard spinning the wheel on the
door that would seal the latch closed.  The room was about seven feet long
and six feet wide.  The walls were metal, but not steel.  The green
corrosion next to the tiny sink bolted to the wall made me think it was
copper.  A toilet was pinned in uncomfortably between the sink and the
twin-sized
metal cot
that
took up most of the space.  I would either have to sleep with my head by
the john or risk turning over with my feet into the water.  There was no
seat cover.

"Hey Sam," Remi's
voice called, wafting up from a vent shaft on the floor.  "Wondered
when you'd find your way in here.  You here legit, or are you here to bust
me out?"

I couldn't help but
grin.  If Remi thought I was badass enough to bust him out of the Bell,
then things were going just fine.  "Legit.  I glued Conyers to a
riser at Homecoming."

It was several minutes before
Remi could catch his breath as his laugh richocheted around the metal
structure, amplfied into a mad cackle.  I laughed too, more at Remi's
unabashed glee at hearing of Conyers's embarassment than at the Principal's
unfortunate demise.