The Compound

by Aisling Rawle

Within minutes of speaking to the girls, I knew that I was one of the most beautiful, and one of the least interesting.

Intelligence can be artificial, but charm is always real,

They didn’t know beauty, these boys. They saw blurred outlines and thought they knew the picture.

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.

With his shirt off, his muscles seemed almost inexplicably large. I couldn’t understand why anyone would need to have that kind of strength in today’s world.

“He nearly drowned Becca,” I said. “Did he? I still want to get to know him, though.”

He was so easy to talk to—he never seemed to think too deeply about anything.

You survived a sunrise banishment if you shared a bed with someone from the opposite sex. There was no safety to be won from being in a same-sex couple. She finished my makeup, and we let the moment go.

Was this how it was always going to turn out? If I stayed here, would I always be under the threat of their strength, the end to every argument, the solution to any problem?

I didn’t hesitate: I shut the door, heaved the cabinet back up against it, and stood, waiting, my limbs trembling, the bottle twitching in my hand. It was made to be used on stubborn kitchen grime. There was a picture of a shining oven, twinkling with ethereal cleanliness. The label told me that it was the nation’s favorite kitchen cleaner. No fuss, no muss, the slogan read in pink, cheery letters.

I continued to struggle to think of what to ask for. It wasn’t that my desire for things had faded, but rather that I felt overwhelmed by choice, panicked that I was forgetting something that I really wanted, worrying that there was always something better that I just hadn’t thought of yet. I was frequently anxious, feeling as though whenever I wasn’t requesting something I was wasting my opportunity.