The Compound

by Aisling Rawle

Intelligence can be artificial, but charm is always real,

I had already known the answer: it was the same every year. I only asked out of my old habit of prompting people to explain things to me even when I knew the answer. When I was a child, I found that it would make people more likely to want to help me, and it served me just as well as an adult.

I thought that we had lost some crucial bit of power, not from the act of being judged, but by showing that it meant something to us.

I’ve always thought that boys somehow believe that the art of seduction comes naturally to beautiful girls, who delight in deploying these arts to devastate those we encounter. In fact, I had no idea how to seduce a man; I only smiled and asked questions, and sometimes laughed. But the twin aspect of being beautiful is struggling to be taken seriously, and, confusingly, I also addressed that obstacle by smiling and asking questions.

She was one of the few girls in the compound who was openly self-conscious about her body. Of course, we all loathed how we looked in some way, but most of us were better at hiding it.

What did it matter to wake up at the same time every morning and wear the same clothes and try to eat more protein but less sugar, when an earthquake or a tsunami or a bomb might end it all at any minute? Or maybe we would all continue to boil, slowly but surely, in the mess that we pretended was an acceptable place to live.