Chapter 10: Class
The weekend couldn’t pass any slower. Dad had avoided me for both days. I didn’t know if he was so angry that he couldn’t be around me or if he was actually reviewing Lou’s footage. I didn’t ask. For the first time I looked forward to school on Monday morning. I left the house with a quick goodbye, and he acknowledged my departure with a grunt. As I walked to school, I tried to make sense of the last few days. I wish I could go back to being the ignorant girl who just wanted to travel out of the city. If I got into much more trouble, I would never leave this city. I was oblivious to my surroundings and almost bumped into her.
“I’ve been trying to get a hold of you all weekend,” Lacey asked with concern.
“Been under house arrest,” I answered, startled by her sudden appearance. “No outside communication.” I rolled my eyes.
She grabbed my wrist. “I’m sorry, my mom blew your cover. Her and her fundraising.”
“Not her fault.” I shook my head. “I was bound to get caught sooner or later.”
“No hard feelings?” Lacey asked.
“None.” I squeezed her hand. “But I need to talk you.” A crowd of boys passed us. I waited until they were farther ahead.
“Shoot. But honestly, you have been acting so strange lately. More secretive than usual. Is it about that boy from the re-enactment?”
“Austin. Kind of. But it’s a lot more than him.”
“I knew it!” She squeezed my hand so tight that I had to let go. “You were, like, all focused with him. What have the two of you been doing? Is that why your dad has put you in lockdown mode?”
“No! It’s nothing like that. Will you shut up for second?” Lacey pretended to be hurt by my comment but I could tell she was dying for details. The girl loved to gossip. I took a second to decide how much to share.
“I got caught going to the Marks. Dad sent some drones to follow me and bring me home.”
“Wow! I didn’t know your dad could do that. Do you think he would ever help my mom track me down?”
“Lacey!”
“Seriously, how many times do you have to be told not to go there? What does your dad say every time?” She thought for a second then did a horrible impression of my dad. “The Marks is no place for young girls.”
“Yeah, yeah. He freaks out over going to the Marks and then tells everyone how safe our city is.”
“Well, he is right. It is safe. There’s nothing that doesn’t get captured on camera. Why does that upset you?”
I gripped her hand again. “What if we aren’t safer? Sometimes I feel like an animal on a very long leash.”
“Pene! You’re so dramatic. Don’t say that in Mr. Stewart’s class. He’ll fail you so fast, it will make your head dizzy. I couldn’t imagine having to take his class a second time.”
“I don’t care about Mr. Stewart,” I exclaimed, stopping her. “Don’t you want to get out of here when you graduate, to see the world?” Lacey shook her head.
“That’s your dream, girlfriend. I want to perform, be on stage at the music hall before the city wide re-enactment. Be loved my thousands.” She smirked. “Maybe met a cute boy. Does Austin have an older brother?”
“Lacey!” I yelled. I loved her dearly but she never took anything I said seriously. I could see the school up on our right as we started walking again. “Come abroad with me after graduation — we’ll apply for a visa lottery and travel for a few years. What do you say?”
“Tempting. Would we meet any cute boys?”
“What if I said yes?”
“You’d be lying,” she smiled. “You are so focused on everything but boys. We’d go some exotic city and I would just hold you back. I’m a homebody. The world is a scary place. Everything I need is right here in the city.” She started up the school steps. “But don’t forget to bring some gifts back from all the places you visit. I’ll never turn down jewelry or clothes.” I laughed and was about to respond when I felt eyes on the back of my neck. I turned suddenly, expecting a drone to be spying on me. Instead I looked up Mr. Stewart. He glared down from the classroom window. His eyes blazed. I dreaded another dictation of his view of history.
As the two of us walked down the hallway, Mr. Stewart came out to greet us. Actually, greeting is too generous a description; directing was more appropriate.
“Ladies, the two of you will be my actresses in today’s class.” We both stopped suddenly. His selection was usually a punishment. This was worse than the group re-enactment. Everyone in the class would watch our mistakes.
A couple times in the school year, Mr. Stewart ‘nominated’ several students to act out various stages of our history. It was a test that students rarely passed since he would pick the most obscure moments of history. Most of the time you had to guess what actions your character would make, often with the wrong results. Even worse, our classmates observed your every step. Your failures would be played back continually throughout the school year. I remembered how last year, Colin, a fairly quiet boy, had been picked. He made such horrible choices under pressure that he had been ostracized ever since. There had to be a way to get out of this.
“Oh, sorry, Mr. Stewart. I can’t.” Lacey was quicker on her feet with an excuse. “I’m not feeling well today, and the video imagery would make me sick. The last thing you want is me yakking in front of the class.”
“Truly.” Mr. Stewart was unfazed by Lacey’s comments. I imagine he had heard every excuse possible. “Unfortunately, unless you have some doctor’s excuse, you will be participating.” His eyes danced over to me, waiting to hear my excuse. So I didn’t give him one.
“I’d love to. I think this is a chance to show the truth about history.”
Mr. Stewart seemed confused about my puzzling response. “I appreciate your enthusiasm, Pene. Historical re-enactments are a visit to our past, an opportunity to learn from our mistakes and build on our successes.”
“But history is an interpretation, is it not?”
“Based on facts, history can be verified by multiple sources. What is your question?”
“I don’t understand your selections. You pick obscure moments in history to test our ability to remember the past. But how do I know the past is accurate?” Mr. Stewart’s eyebrow rose, as if I was challenging the accuracy of his course.
“With your comments, I could to fail you from this course and expel you from school. Is this how you want to your history remembered?” Mr. Stewart looked down at me with cold, hard eyes. Only this time their menace didn’t make me shiver.
“Not at all,” I answered coolly. “I was just asking a question. As I said, I’m happy to participate. I suggest we get going — I imagine the class is waiting.” Behind the classroom doors I could see a number of silhouettes straining to listen in on our conversation. I walked straight into class, not wanting to continue further. If he wanted to talk down to me, I could have twenty witnesses to the event. I walked over by the wall computer screen as Lacey stood beside me. She gave me one of those “Are you crazy?” looks without saying a word. Mr. Stewart interrupted our silent conversation.
“Let’s have your attention.” He looked at the class, and all talking died immediately. “We are fortunate today to have two volunteers for our next history re-enactment.” There was a small smattering of applause; likely they were happy they weren’t picked. “Pene and Lacey will be re-enacting the terrorists’ ransom demands.
“Boring,” one of my classmates whispered. If Mr. Stewart heard, he chose to ignore the comment.
“Would someone in the class like to elaborate on the authority of the city council?” The class was silent. Somewhere crickets were chirping. “Ms. Bennett?” Mr. Stewart stared at one of the girls in the back. She looked a little terrified, and Lacey and I tried to stifle a smile.
“The—the authority?” she stammered.
“I’m looking for the breakdown of the council. How many members? Voting limits? You do remember your assignment from last month?”
“Yeeessss. Ah — the city is divided into 18 wards with the same number of councillors.”
“And?” Mr. Stewart made a motion for her to proceed.
“Ah — they are voted in every five years, with a two-term limit. The mayor is elected at the same time to represent our city and be the liaison with other cities.” She stopped, hoping she had answered the question completely.
“And?” Mr. Stewart looked around the room. Cory shot his hand up. Mr. Stewart nodded at him.
“The Ministry of Justice appoints a member to stand the council, currently Lord Morall. His position isn’t voted on, and he can veto any changes that involve the security of the city.”
“Does this position have any term limits?”
“I don’t think so. He’s been there for as long as I can remember.”
“Since the earthquake, to be exact,” Mr. Stewart continued. “So that’s some background on the city’s government. We will move to a specific meeting between the city’s representatives and the opposing terrorist group.” He turned to look at us. “Ladies, do both of you understand the rules?”
Of course we did; only kids in junior high got the game confused. In the re-enactment, the actors you interacted with were records of history. They might seem real but they wouldn’t deviate too far from their script. The simulations could only answer things they were programmed to know. Ask them something they didn’t know, you’d get a blank stare and then they’d return to their script. They might look real, but it was only your brain making you think they existed. In an earlier class, one of the boys had tried to get a simulation to give him a kiss and learned the hard way that wasn’t part of her programming.
We both looked at each other and then nodded.
“Good,” he answered. “You will be entering one of negotiations.”
It was an unusual choice. Most historical enactments were battles — people loved to participate in a fight, win or lose. The ransom demands by the terrorists were well documented but uneventful. The terms were unacceptable to the city, which led to the explosion and earthquake. End of story. One side said no and the other side went berserk. Not a lot of history to re-enact. I felt I got off easy. Although I had a good idea which one of us was going to play the terrorist side.
“Ladies, please put on your headsets,” Mr. Stewart said, and we reached over to his desk for the apparatus. The two of us would be at the front of the room while the class watched our movements on the viewer screen. “Try to replicate what happened in history to score points. The rest of class will mark down any mistakes you make for extra points for themselves.”
I looked at the sea of classmates staring and smiling at me, happy that it wasn’t them. I put on my headset and the classroom disappeared.
Something was wrong. Instead of assuming a historical role, I saw darkness jolted with moments of static. Then I felt like I was watching a television show.
A car was racing across a desert, teenagers out on a joyride. Only instead of having fun, their faces were etched with fear. A huge shadow was blotting out the sun as two girls and a boy looked up. The view panned up to look back at what was chasing the car. A massive dinosaur with jagged teeth, straight out of Evolution class, was pursuing the car, rapidly gaining with its huge strides. It looked like a Tyrannosaurus rex except the arms were much more developed and it ran on all four limbs. The girl in the passenger seat, who didn’t seem much older than me, pulled a weapon out of the glove compartment and aimed at the huge beast. A blue laser erupted from the gun, blasting straight at the dinosaur. I couldn’t see the impact, but a huge roar blasted out over my speaker and the dinosaur staggered forward. The teenagers in the car screamed and floored the accelerator. Before I could see if the dinosaur landed on the car, the screen went black. What a weird movie.
Then the images faded and the environment changed. Moments later I felt a hard chair as I was sitting in a boardroom. There were several people on my left and a number of city officials across the table from me. I looked up and saw lights dangling down from the ceiling above the conference room. The city emblem was embossed on several wooden chairs and its logo in the center of the table. There were four officials, two older males, one balding and one overweight. Two females, one thin with spiky white hair, and Lacey. She smiled at me and waved.
On my side were three men, two young and one older who seemed to be in charge. I must have replaced the female on the terrorist side. I felt like someone was behind my chair, but before I could look back, the negotiation began.
“The terms are simple,” the older man on my side began. “We want control of the city and its resources. If you do not comply, we will take the city by force.”
“That’s not really a negotiation, Stephan,” the woman with spiky hair answered. “You can’t intimidate your way through this time. Frankly, I doubt you will endanger the lives in the city just to prove your point.”
“Then you would be wrong, Denise. And your mistake will cost lives.”
“No! You will be the one responsible for any loss of life,” the balding man yelled back. “The only person you care about is yourself.”
“Let’s discuss this rationally. No one wants to see any loss of life,” Lacey added. She was playing the role of a mediator, trying to keep both sides talking. Mr. Stewart would give her points for attempting to use negotiating skills.
“There is little to negotiate,” Stephan responded. “The city has proven time after time that you are only interested in making yourselves rich. You could care less what happens to your citizens.”
“And you do?” said Denise. “The only thing you care about is proving yourself right and you don’t care who you have to hurt.”
Their argument was nauseating. Both sides seemed deadlocked in their opinions. History showed that the terrorists were set on ruling the city as a series of little kingdoms or gangs. They felt the new administration would be more responsive to people’s needs, citing that the current councillors only looked after themselves and their staff. The city argued the exact opposite; they stated they were elected fairly (although there were accusations of vote fraud) and that the terrorists were bullies looking to run the city their way, with little regard for the residents. Neither side would reach out to the state government to mediate a fair decision. It made me angry that adults could act so childish with so much at stake.
History had always labeled them the “Terrorists” but they didn’t refer themselves as that. They called themselves “The Liberators.” Freeing the people from the tyranny of the city was their catchphrase. I guess the victors can write history any way they want. Suddenly the unclear nature of the situation got the better of me. Maybe I could rewrite history.
“We should just walk away,” I said, speaking as a part of the Terrorist team. “If we attack, the power plant will explode, causing an earthquake that will kill thousands.”
The participants stared at me as if I had spoken a foreign language. I had broken the unspoken rule — never talk about what actually would occur as a result of their actions. I was supposed to play-act history, recreate or say what had already happened in the past. Even though I couldn’t hear my classmates, I imagined there was an outburst at my antics. Mr. Stewart was probably seconds away from pulling the plug. Lacey stared at me in disbelief.
“Why do we have to destroy the city to prove we’re right?” I stood up to make my point. “Can’t we share power? Maybe compromise?”
“What’s wrong with you, Lilith? When did you become so soft?” Stephan pointed at me.
“Let her speak,” a voice from behind yelled. It was vaguely familiar.
“Actually, it’s the first sensible thing someone on your team has said,” replied Denise. “So far this negotiation has been an absolute waste of time. I almost think you are staging this conflict, Stephan.”
“Unless you’ve paid her off to make our side weak,” he retorted.
“Enough!” I yelled. “I watched both sides enough to know there is never a negotiation.” That part was true. I had watched a number of re-enactments between the two sides before the earthquake, and neither side would budge. They were like two children in a schoolyard fighting over a stick. Eventually the stick breaks and someone gets hurt. “You need to listen to each other. Instead of listing your demands, actually listen to the other side. Then actually offer something of value instead of empty promises.”
The room was silent, and Lacey smiled back at me. For a split second I felt like I had changed history. I had actually made them listen to reason. Things could have been different if someone like me had been there. Then reality set in.
“Take this heretic away. It figures that someone from the city has tried to pay her off. Your group has so much money after stealing from the city, I can only imagine how much you offered her,” jeered Stephan. Rough hands grabbed from me behind.
“Or maybe your side can no longer stomach its sad argument. I’m be surprised if others on your side don’t begin feeling the same way.” Denise pointed at Stephan.
I sagged as I gave up.
“Wait!” a voice from behind me yelled. “What if she’s right? What if our inflexibility causes us to hurt the ones we love?” I turned and looked into young face of someone I hadn’t seen in a lifeline. She looked like me. My mother. The way she was fifteen years ago. But what was she doing on the side of the terrorists when she was a scientist for the city? This didn’t made sense.
As I stared in disbelief at my mother’s face, my headset was turned off and she disappeared for a second time from my life.