The War Game (17 page)

             
Well, that was a start. I stashed it underneath my pillow to finish later. Maybe. I couldn’t erase it because I used up the pink eraser.

~~~

     Something peculiar happened in the middle of the night. Well, Wednesday morning actually. I only heard it, I didn’t witness anything. Miriam watched it but she was half asleep, she recounted it as a dream until I told her I heard the trucks too.

     Usually, I am awakened by the little boy that lives next door. He screams and screams and then the  “mother” screams and screams right back at him. His name is Jerry and he’s ten years old. Miriam met them one day when she was doing some gardening. Miriam said to stay away from the mom and that she seemed “off her rocker.” Whatever a rocker is.

             
This time, I woke up to my bed shaking back and forth. I might no longer be a child, but I still checked under my bed, especially now that I slept alone in a small room. I checked in the closets now too. I didn’t even remember having a closet when I was a kid living with my moms.

             
I heard the rude rumbling of the cars (well, now I know they were trucks) go past our house. Then I heard the wheels scream and a bright light flashed in my room for a couple of seconds, pretty much blinding me.

             
I looked at the clock to see what time it was once the lights went away as quickly as they came. The incident occurred at 45:7. Everything that happened in my room happened at exactly 45:7.

             
The clocks here didn’t work. There were stickers over them. They all showed different times but it was written funny. One of them was 45:7 instead of 4:57. Other clocks showed real but permanent times such as 1:26. Just another way of keeping us in the dark, I guessed.

             
It was like a secret code. Or, the person who was responsible for printing off the stickers didn’t even bother making sure it looked right. The morons probably ran off thousands of stickers before realizing their error.

~~~

             
Sunday. Mailman came. This time he hand-delivered the mail and got our signatures on some paper that none of us could be bothered to read.

             
We took our letters and shared, round-robin style.

             
Carol started first, misdirecting her anger onto us. At least, I felt like I had done something wrong when she was done ranting. “They want me to grow out my hair so it touches my damn shoulders. Why? Why? And I can’t bite my own nails. They can force people who don’t even know each other to act like husband and wife but they can’t force me to stop biting my nails. Oh, and they need to be painted each week and filed down.”

             
Miriam opened her letter and said, “Well, it said I did such a great job on my last intervention that they’re going to unlock a television channel for us.”

             
“Really, which one?” I sat up in my chair. I had never watched an actual television channel but I did know of a few that still existed. Show after show after show. Now that would be something. DVDs were hard to come by, especially the ones worth the time it took to watch them.
             

             
“The Sports Channel. I am required to host a football game pre-show bash this month in the neighborhood. I couldn’t even name a team if you asked me.”

             
I was severely disappointed, to say the least. I knew it wouldn’t be the channels that only show movies but I was hoping for some old, dumb comedies at least. Not stupid sports.

             
We watched men hit baseballs and other men catch them. Exhilarating.

             
“This is a rerun. That stadium doesn’t exist anymore.”

             
“What’s the point of a sports rerun?” Carol asked.

             
“There is none. But I guess since the league was disbanded, at least in this part of the country, they have to resort to showing stuff people have seen before.”

             
“I thought you hated sports.”

             
“I do. I also hate boredom. I read a lot of newspapers.”

             
“Do you have any newspapers with you?

             
“No. Say, since we are now required to say 10,000 words to each other each week. Last week we said a total of 2,817. That was at least a dozen words right there. Okay, Pearl, you start.”

             
Trying to stifle a giggle, I said hello.

             
Miriam motioned me with a wave of her hand to keep going.

             
“Hi, I’m Pearl and I’m going to be your daughter for this evening.” Miriam started to applaud thunderously.

             
“Hi, I’m Carol, and I’m going to be the woman of the house for an unforeseeable future. How the hell do they know how many words we say?”

             
“They’d rather pay someone to tally the words than pay someone to collect the garbage on a weekly basis. And I am Miriam, the other woman of the house who just happens to wear pants all of the time. However, I might take them off from time to time.” Carol made a face where she did not bother to try and conceal her disgust at the thought of Miriam lounging around in her whites, “So stay out of the basement unless you’d like to feel your eyeballs burn.”

             
I thought it was funny. But I would never go into the basement now.

             
“I’ll trade you my skirts for your pants,” Carol offered. Probably the nicest thing she had said yet.

             
“We’ll see if they fit. Okay, we are still about 9,900 or more words short. But luckily, it’s just Monday. Oh, I’ll name the days of the week. Sunday. Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday. Thursday. Friday and Saturday. More points for us.”

             
“Is “okay” one word or two? Like can it be said as in the letters, ‘O’ and ‘K,’” Miriam asked me.

             
“Typically, people write it as one. But you could say it twice and it would count twice.”

             
“Okay. Okay.”

             
“State for the record, your first and last name.”

             
“Carol Bunderson.”

             
“Bunderson? Really?”

             
“Yes, really, Miriam. What’s your full name?”

             
“My birth name was Michael Jay Bernhardson.”

             
“I guess there was no magical method in choosing members for families. They just did it alphabetically,” I said. No personality tests, clearly. Just basically names out of a hat and hope for the best. A great plan for failure.

             
“Pearl, what’s your last name?”

             
I hesitated before saying, “I don’t have a last name. Well, I don’t remember...I guess.”

             
“Okay, here we have for your entertainment tonight: Carol Bunderson, Miriam Bernhandson, and Pearl Idonthavealastnamewellidontrememberiguess. We are all one happy family!”

             
Just then an obnoxious bell rang throughout the house. We all jumped.

             
Miriam didn’t move. Carol didn’t move.

             
Being curious, I walked toward the door. “I’ll get it,” I said to no one in particular, just trying to get our word count up.

             
Now, it was becoming clear that our voices were being picked up by devices implanted in the furniture or walls or something. But what I couldn’t really imagine is a group of people watching and listening to all that tape. How incredibly boring. To get an accurate count of words spoken, they must have had to employ at least a couple of people to double-check the count. Also, they also would have had to rotate shifts because what if we woke up to have a midnight snack and started a conversation? Maybe they hired someone to create transcripts too?

             
I opened the door and there stood a guy I sort of recalled when we first arrived at Camp X. He had blond hair, the whitest teeth, and looked like he’d feel at home on a tennis court or even a yacht. In other words, a hot guy that I had never imagined myself one day being with because the gap between his level and my level is way too wide. And unrealistic.

             
“Hi, I’m Steven. I’m here to take Miss Pearl on a date tonight,” he said with a slight southern drawl.

             
“Date? What date?” Three, I counted the words back in a place that I was quickly forgetting.

~~~

             
Yeah, thanks for the advance notice. I was just falling asleep in the living room not that long ago and now I was in this strange, circular place called a Planetarium.

             
Steven pointed out a bunch of different constellations and famous stars on the program the ushers gave us but I didn’t care much. I did think it was pretty and all but I didn’t need to know anything beyond that.

             
There were quite a few handfuls of mismatches in here, no conversations were detected by my ears. I swear, the half of each pair in the room must have appeared in one of the advertisements or a fashion spread in a
Seventeen
magazine I once read.

             
“So do you like your new house?”

             
“Yes, it’s very nice. Do you like your new house?” I asked, mostly out of politeness and I couldn’t think of much to say, except for repeating the questions he asked me.

             
“I don’t live in your neighborhood.”

             
“Oh, I guess I didn’t know there were more than one of these societies in the area.”

             
“I live in a regular neighborhood. I am part of a youth group that focuses on preventative measures, instead of letting a problem become bigger and bigger. We have been selected to serve-”

             
I suddenly remembered why he looked vaguely familiar. He was at the tables during orientation, handing out yellow cards. On the top it read, “Provisional Citizenship.” I asked him, “Who is this ‘we’?”

             
“We are part of a program called-”

             
“Actually, I don’t care about all of that. What’s the problem? Am I the problem?

             
“No, no, of course not,” then he did this hideous fake laugh that he probably rehearsed in his training program. “We prevent problems. We signed onto this service for five years. The issue that we are trying to prevent is homosexuality.”

             
I rolled my eyes, it’s one of them. I didn’t even try to hide it. “What do you get out of all of this?”

             
“During our service, we get a weekly living allowance. And after the five years have been successfully completed, we receive a scholarship of $100,000.”

             
“$100,000? So what exactly do you do for those five years of service?”

             
The lights dimmed, the sound system made the seats vibrate, and we leaned back into our chairs to watch the show.

             
“Well, we get married.”

             
A crackling sound filled the room, the lights twinkled and changed into different constellations in the ceiling, and this invisible man started talking about Venus and Pisces and who knows what else.

             
“It’s just like being outside,” Steven said.

~~~

             
Steven. Oh, Steven.

             
All the girls stopped me on my walks and kept telling me that I was so lucky and they wished that they could be me. Each time I asked them why they thought so. I got some variation of “because you’re engaged to Steven,” without fail.

             
The other girls in the community tried to get me to hang out with them but I didn’t want to make friends. They were overly eager on pleasing the mailmen so they didn’t get warning letters. Every shirt they wore was starched from too much ironing. They take on what are called “leadership” roles, from tennis technicians (basically, fishing balls out of dirty leaf piles) to street coordinator (someone who tattles on the neighbors for dumb community violations).

             
Yeah, I told the girls. I knew he was good-looking. Yeah, he was also nice. But I got the same kind of thing from the back of my cereal box. Flat. Cardboard. Initially enticing. Something to look at for a while.